Project Information

This is the home page for the Device Ontologies Working Group, a community effort to develop an ontology of oceanographic sensors. MMI is initiating this effort; we seek maximum community participation and feedback.

Telecons are set every other Tuesday at 1600 GMT (in winter; 1500 in summer). Time and agenda for the next meeting are under Next Meeting below. Members of the email list (see below) will receive email 24 hours before the meeting, giving a conference number to call. Minutes are posted after each meeting.

If you want to participate, please sign up for the mailing list. If you want to help, including setting the agenda, please mail graybeal-at-mbari.org.

A fair amount of additional information may be found in the Frequently Asked Questions page; please read that if you intend to participate.

Goal

Develop an ontology of oceanographic devices, including both sensors (which measure things) and samplers (which pick up things). The first priority is to be able to broadly characterize the devices (i.e., sort them into groups). One significant use of such characterizations is to help users (or web applications) discover sensors or data of interest, but a set of use cases is being developed to flesh out the work.

The ontology's terms should be able to be referenced as Uniform Resource Identifiers in sensor-related metadata specifications (e.g., SensorML, TransducerML), and resolved (e.g., through a web browser or an ontology server) to provide additional information as captured by the ontology.

We also have a number of other goals we hope to achieve.

Possible Tasks

We have developed an initial list of possible tasks that will be needed for this project. This serves as a placeholder for ideas, until the team's work begins in earnest.

References

Please see our references page for various materials of interest.

Logistics

1. Logistics FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
2. short name: 'ontdevices', except email list and some files use 'ontdev'
3. MMI Working space: http://marinemetadata.org/ontdevices
4. Mailing list to discuss the topics : http://marinemetadata.org/mailman/listinfo/ontdev
5. Archive of emails: http://mmi.mbari.org/pipermail/ontdev/
6. Device Parameter Details

Collaborations

The Device Ontologies Working Group is collaborating with or has agreements with multiple ocean observatory initiatives. We will document these agreements on our Collaborative Agreements web page.

The effort has an extensive list of participants.