when hydrospheres collide lessons in practical environmental ontologies john graybeal, luis bermudez...
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When Hydrospheres CollideLessons in Practical
Environmental Ontologies
John Graybeal, Luis Bermudez
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project
12 October 2006
Marine M
etadata Interoperability Project
MMI: Brief Introduction
• Started 2004 with NSF funding; recent 3-year NSF award
• Mission: Improve the use and understanding of metadata in marine sciences
• International participation and support• Main deliverables: web site, tools, community
– 300-plus members– Numerous open-source tools like VINE, Voc2OWL– Collaborations with many in community
• Technical Lead: Luis Bermudez
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etadata Interoperability Project
Vocabulary Integration Environment
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etadata Interoperability Project
Background and Motivation
• Guide a marine data repository to tag data sets with the appropriate data source tag
• Help a data portal discover data through semantic inferencing
• Help an instrument manufacturer to categorize their instruments in a consistent and useful way
• Guide other domains to better categorized their data sources
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etadata Interoperability Project
Background and Motivation
MMI Workshop Advancing Domain Vocabularies Aug. 2005 Sensor Group
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etadata Interoperability Project
Plan A: A Sensors Ontology
• Follow-on to Advanced Domain Vocabulary workshop last year– Multiple science domains, plus “sensors”
• Workshop Sensors Team: 6-7 people– Started with GCMD, SWEET vocabularies– Formulated a technique-based hierarchy
• Ontology work was to continue that effort– Some of us were nervous about the work
required to make a sensors ontology
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etadata Interoperability Project
Plan B: A Platforms Ontology• Good to gain experience with the process• Of direct interest to several activities
– SeaSearch: Roy Lowry– MBARI data systems: John Graybeal et al– Metadata interfaces: Bob Arko
• Easier problem on which to start– Fewer critical concepts for categorization– Fewer existing vocabularies– Fewer stakeholders
• Useful for sensor work later
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etadata Interoperability Project
Ontology Context
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etadata Interoperability Project
Tools and Resources
• Concept Schemes: SWEET, CDI Platform Codes, GCMD and Wordnet.
• Dictionaries: Wikipedia, Dictionary.org.• Search Engine: Google, for individual
marine science and technology sites.• Tools: Protégé, SWOOP and Pellet.• Collaboration: WebEx and telephone.• Web Site:
http://marinemetadata.org/sourcesont
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etadata Interoperability Project
Principal Players
• Luis Bermudez, MMI/MBARI (Lead)• Roy Lowry, BODC• Rob Raskin, SWEET• Robert Arko, LDEO• John Graybeal, MMI/MBARI• Michael Hughes, BODC• Marilyn Drewry, UAH• Kevin O’Neill, BODC
Group Photo
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etadata Interoperability Project
Principal Customers
• Portals that want to sort or classify data by platform types
• Programmers or Data Managers that want to tag their data sets with a sourceType
• Interoperable systems that want to mediate between two or more controlled vocabularies
• Operators, developers, manufacturers who describe their platforms in metadata records
• Operation managers who manipulate assets • Funders who allocate money to/for assets
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etadata Interoperability Project
The “Simple” Part
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etadata Interoperability Project
What Are The “Rules”?• Syntactic Goals
– Short words or phrases– Consistent capitalization/punctuation
• Linguistic Goals– Maintain concept order (noun or modifiers first)– Avoid acronyms – At each level, divide concept space into non-
overlapping concepts that fill the space
• Semantic Goals– Common terms (ideally the most common)– Unambiguous words in English & American– Match other vocabularies where possible
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etadata Interoperability Project
Class Name Constructs– Adjectives-Noun placement order. In
English adjective goes first. (ResearchVessel instead
of VesselResearch.) Same pattern was applied in
DOLCE, KOALA, PIZZA ontologies.
– Prefer the common marine term over the logic term.
(DriftingBuoy instead of UnmooredBuoy)
– CamelCase preferred vs Hyphen and underscores.
(ResearchVessel instead of Research_Vessel or
Research-Vessel)
(but: Nonautonomous)
The Professor says…The Professor says…
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etadata Interoperability Project
Little Surprises Everywhere
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etadata Interoperability Project
Unexpected Meanings
• “AUVs* operate in the hydrosphere”– To me (and many), this is earthbound liquid water– AUVs can operate there, even in canals and ponds
• But to hydrologists everywhere, this includes water vapor– An airborne AUV is not a useful concept– But then, what to do with atmosphere and
terrasphere?
* AUV = autonomous underwater vehicle
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etadata Interoperability Project
No More Hydrosphere for Us!
Hydrosphere
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etadata Interoperability Project
What Are The “Rules” (Part 2)?
• How do you organize the ontology? What’s the basis for the framework?– Deployment medium was a clear winner
• How do you choose between 2 equally valid alternatives?– “It depends on how you will use it.”– Helps little in a general purpose ontology– Try to keep model close to reality
• Trouble coming in the sensors work…?
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etadata Interoperability Project
Organizational Basis
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etadata Interoperability Project
Criteria to add a new term• It is not already in the ontology.• It can have a property that differentiates
it from its siblings. (e.g. ship and boat. The dimension of a ship is bigger than a boat.)
• A super-class is promoted when similarities are found among concepts. (e.g. Both Buoy and Research Vessel hasEarthRealmBase water. A new class can be created called WaterBasedPlatform.)
• A term can be categorized under 2 or more categories (e.g., Amphibious Crawler).
The Professor says…The Professor says…
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etadata Interoperability Project
The Results (Ta da!)
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etadata Interoperability Project
Future Work: Sensors!
Sensor Metadata Interoperability Workshop
October 19-20, 2006
Choosing Standards / Learning Standards
http://marinemetadata.org/workshop06
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etadata Interoperability Project
MMI: http://marinemetadata.org
Observing Sources Work: http://marinemetadata.org/sourcesont
Ontologies: http://marinemetadata.org/platformonts
Ontology Mailing List: ont@marinemetadata.org
Email: graybeal@mbari.org | bermudez@mbari.org
Thank you
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