[seek-kr-sms] Re: IMPORTANT information about upcoming SEEK BEAM/KR-SMS/TAXON meeting at Davis,CA, Mar. 7-10, 2005

[Joseph Goguen]

Dear Colleagues,

It is unfortunate that i have lectures and meetings thoughout the day 
and cannot
make it to this event, but i do want to participate at least a bit via 
email.  I find
this project fascinating, and am thinking that it could be an excellent 
application
for schema mapping.  Although im not a taxonomist, it seems to me that the
DiGIR "protocol" really provides a schema for a certain kind of dataset, 
and
that what Nico wants can be achieved by interpreting this schema in 
different
ways in different contexts.  These interpretations can be seen as views from
the schema to itself.  Such views can be non-trivial, involving, for 
example,
translations from one longitude/latitude system to another, and translating
taxonomic names differently, depending on the date and institution (and
possibly other information).  The first of these translations involves 
what are
called "semantic functions" and the second involves what are called
"condidtions" in the database literature.  And of course, it seems more than
possible that some desirable data will be in formats other than DiGIR, so
that translations between different schemas will also be needed.

It seems to me that the SCIA tool that we are building for SEEK in my
lab could perhaps help with constructing and applying such schemas.  It
is a GUI tools that identifies the most problematic matches, helps the
user formulate translations for them, and then does as many other matches
as make sense automatically; the process is iterated until both the user
and system are happy with the result, in which case the resulting view
can be used to do data translations.  The system is designed to be flexible
as far as kinds of schema are concerned, so that XML Schema and DTDs,
relational schema, DiGIR, etc. are all in principle possible, though 
only the
first two are currently supported.  We have developed semantic theories
for heterogeneous schema mappings to support this at the theoretical
level.  It is also possible to apply SCIA to ontology mappings, and for it
to use ontologies in constructing schema mappings.

If we could work with people in this group, i think we could refine the
tool in such a way that it would be really useful.

Comments welcome!

   -- jsoeph

Nico Franz wrote:

> Dear BEAM/UC Davis meeting participants:
>
>   I will see you on Wednesday to talk about "taxonomic resolution" in 
> the BEAM mammal use case. My presentation will revolve around topics 
> introduced in the attached document. We used this write-up to recruit 
> 1-2 Mammalia taxonomists to contribute to the niche modeling project. 
> Reading through it will prepare you well enough for what's to come on 
> Wednesday morning.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Nico
>
> *Nico M. Franz, Ph.D.
> *Postdoctoral Research Fellow
> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
> MSB, Room # 3411, University of California
> Santa Barbara, CA  93106-6150
>
> Phone: (805) 893-5934; Fax: (805) 893-8062; E-mail: franz at nceas.ucsb.edu
> Website: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~franz/ 
> <http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/%7Efranz/>
>
> Mark Schildhauer wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> Enclosed is some general information (Goals,  Background, Preparatory 
>> items, and Tentative  Agenda) for participants in the upcoming 
>> meeting of the BEAM (Biodiversity and Ecological Analysis and 
>> Modeling)  group with the KR/SMS (Knowledge Representation/Semantic 
>> Mediation) group of the SEEK (Science Environment for Ecological 
>> Knowledge; http://seek.ecoinformatics.org).  Plus, we will also be 
>> covering some interesting developments in the area of taxonomic name 
>> services, and representatives of SEEK TAXON will be present. Whew, 
>> sorry for the  flurry of acronyms. [snip]
>>
>> -- 
>> Mark P. Schildhauer, Ph.D. --  Director of Computing
>> NCEAS --  National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
>> 735 State St., Suite 300       Santa Barbara, CA   93101-3351   
>> Email: schild at nceas.ucsb.edu   WEB: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu
>> Phone: 805-892-2509            FAX: 805-892-2510
>>  
>>