The 2-year NSF collaborative proposal titled “EarthCube IA: Collaborative Proposal: Cross-Domain Observational Metadata Environmental Sensing Network (X-DOMES)” has been funded by NSF's EarthCube project. The researchers in this project are researching new and evolving methods to observe properties and to process the collected observations. This is a pilot project seeking to target large-NSF funded data programs and associated sensor manufacturers to implement proven technologies in the capture of sensor metadata.  MBARI's Carlos Rueda is participating in the project to provide support for, and changes to, the MMI Ontology Registry and Repository.

The ESIP Federation has awarded MMI's John Graybeal a grant to deploy the MMI Ontology Registry and Repository, ORR, as an ESIP testbed application. The grant was awarded this summer, and the work is expected to be completed by the end of 2015.

The new ORR instance will be deployed on ESIP's AWS cloud, and will be called the ESIP Community Ontology Repository. It provides a new resource for the Earth science community, and is not expected to move or duplicate any of the existing ORR semantic assets.

Today, Google reported that they are cancelling the Google Code project hosting repository. This brings no worries for MMI; we recently migrated from Google Code to our GitHub repository, thanks to our sharp Technical Lead. And Google put some effort into fixing a bug we reported, so we can still access our old repositories on Google Code if needed.

Given the news, this seems like a good opportunity to consider what makes sites last in the Internet era. Every now and then we at MMI hear someone say "the MMI project is ending." This is always surprising (and vexing) for us to hear, as MMI remains the largest collection of metadata resources in the earth science community, with active operational support by TAMU-Corpus Christi, technical and project leadership, and members of its international Steering Committee. What lets MMI remain active and respected, despite periods of limited funding, while projects like Google Code are retired? 

MMI has created a new service to browse Standard Names of the NetCDF Climate and Forecast Convention.

CFSN uses the CF Standard Names vocabulary, as hosted in the MMI Ontology Registry and Repository, to provide a browseable and searchable interface to the Standard Names. With the CFSN tool, you can easily see the Standard Names, their definitions, and their canonical units; search for any particular standard name or substring (including Regular Expression and GLOB searching!); and follow linked names to learn more about any specific name. But there are more features than that….

Migration of MMI web completed

The MMI Web Site, where you are reading this, has transitioned to its new home at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC), in the Harte Research Institute.

This paper serves as a simple basic introduction to semantic tools and mediation, an overview of MMI's semantic framework and tools, and a great citation for the MMI ORR work that has been funded by NSF and supported by MMI's staff and many volunteers.