Construction of Marine Vocabularies in the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project

MTS/IEEE OCEANS 2005 Americas
September 19-23, 2005, Washington, DC

L Bermudez

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

Monterey, CA

bermudez@mbari.org, 831-775-1929

J Graybeal

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

A Isenor

Defence R&D Canada

R Lowry

British Oceanographic Data Centre

DJ Wright

Dept of Geosciences, Oregon State Univ

Corvallis, OR 97331-5506

dawn@dusk.geo.orst.edu

Data producers often overlook existing metadata descriptors and controlled vocabularies for describing their data, opting instead to create custom descriptors and vocabularies. One of the objectives of the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project is to reduce this vocabulary proliferation. The work is accomplished as community collaborations, which are supported via the content management framework of the MMI site. Services, processes, techniques, and advice are all offered via the community site supported by the MMI (marinemetadata.org). As part of the services, MMI has created and made available marine ontologies based on existing vocabularies. Ontologies are an explicit and formal specification of mental abstractions. Ontologies are being published using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the ontology expression tool recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and made available using web services. By providing these services using common terminology, the MMI effort facilitates discovery, sharing, and markup of marine data.

The MMI methodology for creating the marine ontologies is composed of: identification, harmonization, alignment and mapping, and publication. First the marine vocabulary is identified. The namespace and the required transformation are then documented. Then the vocabulary is harmonized by transforming the vocabulary into OWL format. Having all the marine vocabularies in OWL allows the alignment and mapping between the various ontologies, aligning terms in one ontology with similar terms in the other ontologies. This creates, for example, the "is a member of" kinds of relationships within the ontologies. However, the most useful product of the mapping is the creation of semantically equivalent and yet disjoint relationships among terms. Finally the ontologies are published via web services. The first three parts of this methodology, which form the foundation for the development of true semantic interoperability, will be discussed in the paper.

Principal Tech Area/Keywords: 8.0 Information Processing, Modeling & Simulation :: 8.3 Modernizing Ocean Data and Information Systems
Alternate Tech Areas: 18.0 Achieving a Sustained Integrated Ocean Observing System :: 18.5 Global Ocean Observing Systems

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