Ocean Observing Systems Interoperability Planning Workshop

This is the first meeting of a two-meeting series to advance ocean systems semantic interoperability. (You may also wish to visit Part 2 of the Workshop Series.) In this meeting, we will do the planning and introductions to set the stage for the second, much larger meeting.

Background

Currently, there are many vocabularies in use by different data systems in the IOOS community. This cacophony of vocabularies inhibits interoperability between data systems, as well as the ability of IOOS to operate as a whole, integrated system.

To address this need, and in fulfillment of the mission of the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project ("promoting the exchange, integration and use of marine data through enhanced data publishing, discovery, documentation and accessibility"), MMI will host two workshops aimed at mapping between controlled vocabularies used in the IOOS community and implementing those mappings in (an) end application(s), thereby improving interoperability and data access within IOOS.

The workshops will focus primarily on domains represented by the 20 IOOS Core Variables, be driven by several use cases, It will be coordinated with Q2O (the QARTOD-to-OGC-project) and GCOOS (Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System) activities. Software tools to be used will include Voc2OWL/Voc2RDF, Vocabulary Integration Environment (VINE), Protégé, and a newly developed MMI Ontology Repository.

The first workshop will be a smaller preparation meeting, where we hope to have a few key teams and key members representing other teams. We will hold the first workshop August 26-28, 2008 in conjunction with Q2O and GCOOS teams.

We will hold the second workshop, also in conjunction with the Q20 and GCOOS teams, in November, 2008.