[seek-kr-sms] SMS Partial Design -- Request for Comments

[Rich Williams]

Good stuff Shawn!  Here are a few comments on the registration mapping part,
mainly to do with EML.  I think it's important to leverage the work done on
EML and integrate it with the semantics.  We need to establish a mapping
between EML and the OWL ontologies and capture the semantics that are
implicit in EML.

I think that a lot of the semantic description of the dataset as a whole
could be derived from the EML metadata, assuming it is reasonably complete.
For example, information about the spatial and temporal extent of the
dataset and about the observed taxa should be in the metadata.  Then rather
than handing the user an essentially empty mapping, we will have initialized
the mapping as far as possible from the EML metadata.

Given a data set with EML metadata, I see a two-stage semantic registration:

1)	Automatically create high-level (data set and data table level) RDF
individuals for an EML-described data set.  They will be useful for allowing
a high level search of a data set, which can be rejected if there's nothing
of interest in the RDF individuals before the more detailed semantic
registration is used.

2)	Create a lower-level semantic registration of individual fields in a data
table.  This will refer to the higher-level EML-based individuals for parts
of the context that do not change from field to field.  When doing a
semantic query, these individuals will only need to be instantiated and
queried if thtere is a higher-level match (#1 above).

Given this, in your document, I think it would make sense to re-order the
sequence proposed, so that step 6 happens before steps 2-5.

Rich