Semantic Interoperability: a Goal for Marine Data Management

Roy Lowry, Luis Bermudez & John Graybeal:

Whilst the problems of syntactic interoperability between data sources have reduced significantly through the acceptance of standard formats such as NetCDF and Microsoft package formats, the problem of semantic interoperability remains. Semantic interoperability is like language translation for science-making sure the terms we each use in our data can be understood by people and computers, allowing data to be exchanged reliably and automatically. There are steps that those who are in the enviable position of building a marine data system from scratch can take to maximise the possibility that their system will achieve semantic interoperability. From defining terms, to using standards, to linking data and metadata, following simple guidelines will make a system's data available to many more researchers, much longer into the future. If users are to adopt vocabulary and content standards then those responsible for maintaining the standards need to deliver service that includes versioning, convenient access to current and past versions and timely response to requests from users for updated content. In most cases this has not been achieved to date. Those with either legacy data or strongly enforced local terminology will need vocabulary maps if they are to interoperate semantically. The Marine Metadata Interoperability Initiative (http://marinemetadata.org) has been developing high quality tooling to facilitate building this type of map. The time has now come for the marine science community to help evolve these tools and apply them to capture its domain expertise into semantic web resources that will form the basis for future semantic interoperability.