"Ontologist's Perspective" - Marine Environmental Data
This document provides an overview of controlled vocabularies and ontologies for marine environmental data. It discusses: 1) The history of controlled vocabularies in oceanography, including their initial publication as hard copies and CSV files and later improvements to content and technical governance through projects and committees. 2) Current use cases for controlled vocabularies, including metadata markup, drop-down lists, semantic crosswalks, and enabling semantic discovery and web processing services. 3) Recent developments including the design of an updated NERC Vocabulary Server that implements the latest SKOS standard and provides true thesauri, an improved RESTful API, and tools for concept visualization, search and editing.
"Ontologist's Perspective" - Marine Environmental Data
- 1. Ontologists perspective Marine environmental data Adam Leadbetter (alead@bodc.ac.uk), British Oceanographic Data Centre
- 2. Overview - A history lesson - An aside - Use cases - Recent developments - The future?
- 3. A History Lesson - The concept of controlled vocabularies is well established in the oceanographic domain - Decades! - Initially published in hard copy form - Then as .CSV via FTP - Governance issues ensued!
- 4. A History Lesson - Content governance improvements - Projects that care about content e.g. NERC Data Grid, SeaDataNet - Committees and mailing lists e.g. CF Standard Names, SeaVoX
- 5. A History Lesson - Technical governance improvements - Development of the NERC Vocabulary Server (NVS) - V 1.X uses a vocabulary data model - Entries comprise: key, term, abbreviated term, definition, semantic relationships
- 6. An Aside - We work in the thesauri area of the spectrum - With > 30,000 concepts; > 100,000 mappings
- 7. Use Cases - Metadata markup with verifiable content - Dynamic drop down lists - Semantic cross-walk - Smart discovery - Semantic enablement of WPSs
- 8. Use Cases - EC FP7 Project NETMAR
- 9. Use Cases - EC FP7 Project NETMAR: ICAN Pilot NETMAR Extended Ontology Coastline - Shoreline - High res coastline NETMAR Semantic High res Framework coastline Coastline? Data including: Shoreline & High res Shoreline coastline Washington State Atlas California Atlas Local vocabulary Local vocabulary
- 10. Recent Developments - Design and construction of NVS V2.0 - Move from original version of SKOS to latest - Payload includes governance & provenance infromation - Ability to deliver true thesauri as concept schemes - Provision for multilingual (human!) support
- 11. Recent Developments - NVS V2.0 also upgrades the API - RESTful and SOAP interfaces - Nine methods available in API - Concept deprecation now an option - Visualisation, search and edit tools
- 13. The future? - Ontology extension - Already have soft links to WoRMS & ITIS - GEMET, MMI ORR - Mulitingual concept titles, definitions - More API methods? - SPARQL?
- 14. Thank you!