5. Find Related Terms

Actor(s)

A scientist or other use who has a given term, but wants to find other expressions that are used to mean the same (or related) things.

Description

The scientist, Eli, knows the most common terms that are used to represent sea surface temperature in the oceanographic community. But he doesn't know how to search for the same concept in other communities that might have data, like the atmospheric measurement community. He also would like to know terms that the lay public or press might use, because he is looking for articles and other accounts that may be useful in his studies. (In the context of a Regional Association or other federation of observing systems, Eli may specifically want to know what terms a certain set of providers uses, for example to see what terms are most common, or to use the local terminology in each case.) So Eli wants to go to a specific repository of terms and, by entering a specific term in a known vocabulary, search for other terms that correspond to the term of interest. Each term should be presented with any corresponding (or requested) metadata, including the source vocabulary for the term, the owner of that vocabulary, a definition of the term, when it was last updated, and how many other terms it has been linked to.

Solution Space

A deep ontology (vocabulary) repository should provide all of the services listed. The beginnings of such a repository will be presented soon at the Marine Metadata site. In other communities, more advanced repositories exist and are heavily used; the National Center for Biomedical Ontology BioPortal is a leading example.