Strategy for Data Sources 2006

View the list of documents related to this activity.

Power Point presentation at AGU

In August 2005 the Marine Metadata Initiative (MMI) held a workshop to coordinate the mapping of science domain vocabularies. The sensor team at the workshop identified that there was not an existing comprehensive ontology for sensors used by the marine science community. However, they identified that the best starting point for the creation of such ontology was Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) instrument keywords or the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) sensor ontology, which is based on the former one. In the process of such endeavor the team found that GCMD top categories presented a mixture of domain and measurement types, many sensors would fit into more than one class, and there is a mixture/overlap of instruments and platforms concepts.

Continue the work started by the sensor team, by providing two three-hour sessions via web conferencing, using Protege to create an ontology, with additional work done by participants between the sessions. If mappings need to be done, they will be created with VINE in other additional sessions. The GOAL is to have an ontology and lessons learned by May 10th, and present the work to the community in the Joint Assembly (AGU, Geochemical, Mineralogical, Geophysicists) Conference, where we submitted this abstract and gave this presentation.

An ontology presents a hierarchy of concepts that helps in the understanding of a domain. This ontology will present a hierarchy of concepts for marine data source types. The ontology will fulfill the following purposes:

• Guide a marine data repository to tag data sets with the appropriate data source tag (e.g. satellite).
• Help a data portal discover data. For example when searching for remote sensing data, data tagged with the "satellite" term, will be retrieved, since the ontology will tell that "satellite" data is also "remote sensing" data.
• Help an instrument manufacturer to categorize their instruments in an homogenous way.
• Guide other domains to better categorized their data sources.

Participants should have these prerequisites:

• an interest and experience in marine data sources (platforms, sensors, etc.)
• Be familiar with work done by Sensors Group at MMI Workshop
• familiarity with SWEET Ontologies (Introduction to SWEET, SWEET Ontologies web site, and the SWEET sensor ontology)
• familiar with GCMD Instrument categorization
• previous experience with Protege, 3.1.1 (tool that we will use to create the ontology).  You can find a basic tutorial here.
• basic notion about ontologies (At least they should have read the following Ontology Creation Guide and have seen for more than 15 minutes the PIZZA ontology example that comes with the latest version of Protege 3.1.1).

Click here to learn how to use the web conferencing tool, Webex.

• Luis Bermudez
• Rob Raskin
• Bob Arko
• Roy Lowry
• Michael Hughes
• John Graybeal
• Kevin O'Neil
• Marilyn Drewry