[Data-Mongers] CORRECTION! Noon Monday, 1/24 Informatics Talk - C. Chandler - Developing an Ontology for Ocean Biogeochemistry Data

[Holly Miller]

Apologies for the previous erroneous subject line.

The next Informal Lunch Talk will be:

When: Noon, Monday, January 24, 2011
Where: Starr 209 on the MBL Campus (map)
Who: Cyndy Chandler, Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office and WHOI
Title: "Developing an Ontology for Ocean Biogeochemistry Data."

Summary:
Semantic Web technologies offer great promise for enabling new and better scientific research.  However, significant challenges must be met before the promise of the Semantic Web can be realized for a discipline as diverse as oceanography.  Evolving expectations for open access to research data combined with the complexity of global ecosystem science research themes present a significant challenge, and one that is best met through an informatics approach.

The Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) is funded by the National Science Foundation Division of Ocean Sciences to work with ocean biogeochemistry researchers to improve access to data resulting from their respective programs.   In an effort to improve data access, BCO-DMO staff members are collaborating with researchers from the Tetherless World Constellation (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) to develop an ontology that formally describes the concepts and relationships in the data managed by the BCO-DMO.  The project required transforming a legacy system of human-readable, flat files of metadata to well-ordered controlled vocabularies to a fully developed ontology.  To improve semantic interoperability, terms from the BCO-DMO controlled vocabularies are being mapped to controlled vocabulary terms adopted by other oceanographic data management organizations.  While the entire process has proven to be difficult, time-consuming and labor-intensive, the work has been rewarding and is a necessary prerequisite for the eventual incorporation of Semantic Web tools.

From the beginning of the project, development of the ontology has been guided by a use case based approach.  The use cases were derived from data access related requests received from members of the research community served by the BCO-DMO.  The resultant ontology satisfies the requirements of the use cases and reflects the information stored in the metadata database.  The BCO-DMO metadata database currently contains information that powers several different user and machine-to-machine interfaces to the BCO-DMO data repositories.  One goal of the ontology development project is to enable subsequent development of semantically-enabled components (e.g. faceted search) to enhance the power of those interfaces.  Addition of semantic capabilities to the existing data interfaces will improve data access through enhanced data discovery.

In addition to sharing the ontology, we will describe the challenges encountered thus far in the project, the technologies currently being used, and the strategies associated with the use case based informatics approach.

Speaker Bio:

Cyndy Chandler is a project PI and co-manager of the NSF funded Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) and is an Information Systems Associate in the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).  During her 30 years at WHOI she has participated in 35 research cruises and is one of the three originating PIs for the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) project funded by NSF to ensure proper stewardship of data collected aboard research vessels in the US academic fleet.  Her current research interests include several collaborative projects in the field of ocean informatics: development of a framework for the publication of scientific data; encouraging development and use of controlled vocabularies for improving the management and efficacy of oceanographic research data; and development of an ontology for biogeochemistry data.

Related Web sites: 
BCO-DMO http://bco-dmo.org/
R2R  http://rvdata.us/


The Monday Lunch talks are held every other Monday. We have created a wiki page for these and other Informatics events in Woods Hole. Please consider giving a talk, we have lot's of openings in 2011! Let us know if you about any informatics related event and we will add it to this page. Those of you who haven't subscribed to the Informatics discussion list, you might want to. Information on how to subscribe is on the wiki page above.

See you Monday!

Holly Miller 
hmiller at mbl.edu

Anne Thessen 
athessen at eol.org

Andrew Maffei 
amaffei at whoi.edu


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