6. Get More Information

Actor(s)

An educator, member of the public, or technician that wants to find resources that talk about certain data types.

Description

The lay person Fay has a data set that has named parameters -- in fact, the parameter names come from a vocabulary that was created for this community data set. But Fay would like to find more information -- some science papers, but also some general reading material -- about these parameters. Questions Fay would like to find the answers to include whether these parameters are related to global warming, how accurately this kind of data can be collected, and what other data from this area may be correlated with this data. But the community terms used for the data set aren't particularly good search terms for Google -- 'fluorescence' finds a lot of links about day-glo markers and red tides. Fay finds a 'semantic search engine' that seems promising at finding good information references. But Fay doesn't have the technical expertise to describe the semantic meaning of the terms she is seeing. She needs a way to get from her vocabulary terms to a broader understanding of the concepts.

Solution Space

Semantic search engines like Noesis provide for the selection of broader and narrower terms within an ontology or hierarchical vocabulary, and construct more meaningful search phrases for search engines like Google. Term resolution services, such as those found in ontology repositories, can provide additional context and knowledge about any uniquely specified term, if it is described in the repository or in a location on the web.