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

Tue Apr 6 10:15:38 PDT 2004

Shawn: 

First, I wish we all had such nice design documents! Great!

Second, I agree with Rich and Matt that we need to make use of EML as
much as we can. Also Rich's idea of "initializing" the semantic
registration mapping from the EML info makes sense to me.

So much for the good news ;-)

Now I think we need to figure out a way to work with some actual EML
examples and see how those and the "ad-hoc" examples that Shawn has
come up with (or is coming up with) fit into a single framework.

The nice thing about Shawn's examples (e.g., in the DILS paper) is
that they are simple and show the principle approach. 

Looking at the EML file that Matt pointed us to, I see a lot of
structural information e.g., here
http://metacat.nceas.ucsb.edu/knb/servlet/metacat?action=read&qformat=knb&docid=knb-lter-gce.23.4&displaymodule=entity&entitytype=dataTable&entityindex=1

and some temporal, spatial, and taxonomic coverage.

Is that were we should start?

Shawn, Rich, Matt?

Bertram

>>>>> "MJ" == Matt Jones <jones at nceas.ucsb.edu> writes:
MJ> 
MJ> I think its a great approach, Rich.  EML does indeed have a lot of the 
MJ> information that you would want in the the semantic representation, and 
MJ> grabbing information out of EML woulod reveal a lot about 
MJ> addiitons/changes to EML that would be useful.  There are a lot of 
MJ> partial EML documents filled out, but more recently a few pretty 
MJ> extensively filled out documents.  In particular, there are 181 data 
MJ> sets in the KNB from the GCE LTER site that have extensive metadata, 
MJ> including taxonomic, spatial,and temporal coverage, and full metadata on 
MJ> the data tables.  And they have data available.  Starting with one or 
MJ> more of these might be useful as a mapping exercise.  For example, this 
MJ> data set --
MJ> 
MJ> http://metacat.nceas.ucsb.edu/knb/servlet/metacat?action=read&qformat=knb&docid=knb-lter-gce.23.4
MJ> 
MJ> -- (and others like it) contains abundance data that could be used by 
MJ> the Garp algorithm if only a research could determine that the 
MJ> relationships between what Garp requires and what is present in the data 
MJ> set are met.
MJ> 
MJ> Matt
MJ> 
MJ> Rich Williams wrote:
MJ> 
>> I agree that metadata to semantics is a generic issue, not just an issue for
>> EML.  For example, I expect that we'll find it useful to grab the basic
>> structure (syntax) of an actor from the MoML when semantically describing
>> it.  For now, I think EML is particularly important since it's in use and
>> has significant semantic content.  The ontologies currently provide a basic
>> framework that should be able to handle the mapping, though I'm sure that
>> implementing the mapping will reveal plenty of holes in the details.  I'm
>> ready to work on it if there's consensus that this is an important
>> direction.
>> 
>> Rich
>> 
>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Shawn Bowers [mailto:bowers at sdsc.edu]
>>> Sent: Monday, April 05, 2004 9:32 PM
>>> To: Rich Williams
>>> Cc: seek-kr-sms at ecoinformatics.org; Dave Thau; Ilkay Altintas; Joseph
>>> Goguen; Jenny Guilian WANG
>>> Subject: Re: [seek-kr-sms] SMS Partial Design -- Request for Comments
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> This makes sense to me: do the metadata "harvesting" first to build the
>>> initial "template" (or as you say, high-level mapping); then let the
>>> data or service provider fill in the additional mapping as needed.
>>> 
>>> Note also that there may be different types of metadata: EML for
>>> datasets (there are possibly others for datasets, but we seem focused on
>>> EML) and MoML or WSDL for services.  Not sure how much can be obtained
>>> from the service ones.
>>> 
>>> I also wonder if the ontologies are already close to being able to
>>> handle the mapping from the high-level EML.  We should look into this.
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Shawn
>>> 
>>> Rich Williams wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> 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
>> 
>> 
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MJ> 
MJ> 
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