Announcing: MMI Ontology Registry prototype

New Ontology Registry under Development

MMI and SURA (Southeastern Universities Research Association) announce the development of a prototype Ontology Registry and Repository for Marine and Environmental Science ontologies.

The registry, which will store ontologies, ontology mappings, and metadata associated with those artifacts, is intended to be available for general scientific use by the end of 2008.

Some services are already available at the prototype registry for a few ontologies, but the providers emphasize this is a highly preliminary version of the service, and should not be relied upon operationally. More extensive development and collaborations with other leaders in the scientific ontology community will be announced in the near future.

Background

For several years the marine science community (and other environmental scientific communities) have identified the need for robust ontology hosting and registration services. These services can act as a permanent lookup and storage site for community vocabularies, but also as community development and information resources. Although the need has been clear, no single entity has been in a position to undertake such development.

With the prompting of community members and the support of Luis Bermudez of SURA, the MMI Steering Committee agreed this spring to initiate development of such a repository, and to host it as part of the MMI site. Development started earlier this year, and MMI has made a protoype version accessible.

Collaborations

MMI is actively pursuing collaborations with other teams working on similar projects. One such effort is the Open Ontology Repository project, sponsored by a number of contributors from science and industry. MMI has been participating in conceptualization and requirements development for this open source project, and will collaborate with the OOR development to the maximum extent possible.

Other collaborations will be announced as they are finalized.

Developer Credits

Luis Bermudez has been the principal developer of the MMI Ontology Registry to date, aided on logistics and requirements by John Graybeal. With the arrival of the MMI Technical Lead Carlos Rueda, development of the repository is accelerating, in anticipation of MMI workshops planned later this year.

Requirements

MMI is developing a set of requirements (expressed as simple use cases) for the Registry. The requirements will also reflect the Open Ontology Repository use cases. Members of the community are encouraged to join or review the products of this development effort.

For More Information

For more information, contact John Graybeal or Luis Bermudez..