Ontologies—November 2008

The significant effort devoted to the MMI tools during the last several weeks, which are now better integrated through the MMI Registry and Repository, turned out to be, as planned, a central component during the Ocean Observing Systems Semantic Interoperability Workshop held in November 17-20 in Boulder, CO. Besides the traditional tools (VINE and Voc2RDF, which have been substantially improved), the new services, namely, the Ontology URI Resolver service, the Ontology Metadata Editor, and our deployment of the Stanford BioPortal repository system as the general framework, were comprehensively exercised during the various hands-on sessions. Although a number of issues as well a feature requests were identified, the overall system responded very satisfactorily to the demands of the exercises, while demonstrating its stability and good level of user interface consistency. These are notable accomplishments given the short period of design and development that was allocated to provide for the several new requirements. Feedback has been extraordinarily encouraging.

Work on the Ontology for Devices group has continued in the form of reviewing and updating the list of use cases as part of a new iteration to improve the ontology representation of marine devices.

Our deployment of the BioPortal system has been significantly complemented with various modules developed by MMI, in particular, for metadata management, URI resolution, and SPARQL queries, which either are missing or are available with limited functionality in BioPortal. We have continued holding regular meetings with the BioPortal team to foster a mutual collaboration, which, based on the identification of common requirements, is intended to address and provide key functionalities related with anontology repository for the community.