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MMI Semantic Web Services and Tools

http://mmisw.org/

The MMI Semantic Web Services and Tools web site

http://mmisw.org/orr/ – The MMI Ontology Registry and Repository (MMI ORR) is the main entry point.

The functionality provided by the MMI ORR includes:

Registration and hosting of vocabularies and ontologies
Easy ingestion and registratrion of vocabularies in tabular form
Easy definition of terms mappings accross multiple vocabularies
Web dereferencing of vocabularies, terms, and mappings
Metadata management
Versioning
Fully-hosted and re-hosted modes of registration
Programmatic access via HTTP based APIs

Documentation: MMI ORR User Manual

Status: Although various modules are now pretty stable, we still consider the system in alpha status. More status details here.

Motivation

With the proliferation of vocabularies specific to projects, data repositories, domains, and even individual scientists, finding and using data has become a manual and often labor-intensive task. To facilitate data discovery in the oceanographic realm, MMI has developed web services and tools, provided guides, and hosted mapping sessions and workshops to identify the most important usage and discovery vocabularies and to create crosswalks from other vocabularies to the recommended ones.

In addition, MMI has conceived and begun implementing a semantic framework, to let the Marine science community leverage this library of semantic work. MMI wrote up a description of the semantic framework, which includes both a general overview of the framework's operations, and details about user and software interactions.

To make the ontologies and the mappings available, the ontologies are stored in a data base, indexed and made available using web services. Each term in the ontologies is also made a first-class resource on the web, named with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which can be used to dereference additional metadata about the resource.