An Ontology for Marine Observables

An Ontology for Marine Observables

May 2006

Luis Bermudez

Robert Arko

Marilyn Drewry

John Graybeal

Roy Lowry

Kevin O’Neill

Rob Raskin

2

Marine M

etadata Interoperability Initiative

Started with Platforms.. We thought it was easier…

May 2006

Luis Bermudez

Robert Arko

Marilyn Drewry

John Graybeal

Roy Lowry

Kevin O’Neill

Rob Raskin

An Ontology for Instrument Platforms

4

Marine M


NSF starter funding, with SURA(ONR) in-

kind support, NOAA CSC bridge funds.

International contributions and support.

Main deliverables: web site, a

community, demonstrations and tools.

Goal for future: Solve the metadata

problem.

Background and MotivationMarine Metadata Interoperability

5

Marine M


Background and Motivation

MMI Workshop Advancing Domain Vocabularies Aug. 2005 Sensor Group

6

Marine M



SensorML instance for a system (http://vast.nsstc.uah.edu/SensorML/)To be used in Tethys and OpenIOOS interoperability demonstrations

Controlled Vocabulary for Data Producers

7

Marine M



MOQuA environment (http://aosn.mbari.org/moqua/)

Controlled Vocabulary for Web Portals

8

Marine M


Strategy

Overall Strategy: Public Effort -> Invited all the communities interested.

One milestone: Version 1.0 Beta - May 2006 5 Web conferencing Telecons - 3 hours each Mailing List: [email protected] One meeting face to face: Lunch at

Geoinformatics Conference this month.

9

Marine M


Ontology - Classes

10

Marine M


Ontology - Classes

Alignment with other vocabularies

CDI = Common Data Index developed bySEA-SEARCH partners. (30 European Coastal States)

11

Marine M


Ontology - Classes

12

Marine M


Ontology - Classes

13

Marine M


Ontology - Properties of a Platform

20060410

20060514

Extensible Approach

14

Marine M


Universal Realms - based on SWEET

15

Marine M


Lessons Learned

16

Marine M


Use - case driven

The construction process depends on how will the ontology be used

17

Marine M


Use - case driven

http://marine.rutgers.edu/coolroom/education/upwelling.htm

A buoy senses an upwelling event Is there a research vessel around to measure in more detail the phenomena? Are there any AUVs near by that can change their route (adapt) ?

18

Marine M


Guides necessary for ontology non-experts

First session: Protégé Pizza Ontology

19

Marine M


Ontology guides

A Practical guide to building OWL Ontologies using the Protege-OWL Plugin.. (Horridge M., Knublauch H., et. al.)

20

Marine M


Issues Pizza Guides:Lack of complicated properties such as

Mobility.Lack of comparison between individuals

(Wine ont.) vs classes (Pizza Ont.) constructs.

Ontology expertise in the group is essential to provide real-time input. For example… is immobile a mobile quality ?

Ontology guides

21

Marine M


Class Name Constructs

Adjectives-Noun placement order. In English

adjective goes first. (ResearchVessel instead of

VesselResearch). Same pattern was applied in

DOLCE. KOALA, PIZZA ontologies.

Prefer the common marine term than the logic term.

(DriftingBuoy instead of UnmooredBuoy)

CamelCase preferred vs Hyphen and underscores.

(ResearchVessel instead of Research_Vessel or

Research-Vessel)

22

Marine M


Criteria to add a new term

It is not already in the ontology. It can have a property that differentiates it

from its siblings. (e.g. ship and boat. The dimension of a ship is bigger than a boat.)

A super-class is promoted when similarities are found among concepts. (e.g. Both Buoy and Research Vessel hasEarthRealmBase water. A new class can be created called WaterBasedPlatform.)

A term can be categorized under 2 or more categories. (e.g. Amphibious crawler.)

23

Marine M


Debugging an Ontology

We use Pellet reasoner to automatically classified the ontology and to find inconsistencies.

24

Marine M


Tools and Resources

Concept Schemes: SWEET, CDI Platform Codes, GCMD and Wordnet.

Dictionaries /pedias: Wikipedia, Dictionary.org.

Google, where you can get individual marine science and technology web sites.

Tools: Protégé, SWOOP and Pellet.

25

Marine M


Web Conferencing

WEBEX better than solely email list.

We should explore other options like Access Grid VC.

If possible face to face meetings is the best choice.

26

Marine M


Conclusions

More classes were created for WaterBasedPlatforms than others - due to the expertise of the participants in this domain.

ObjectProperties are preferred over DatatypeProperties.

Is a long process - agreement is not easy. Keep guides and ontology experts around. Keep groups maximum around 5-7. Watch out - you may become addicted !

27

Marine M


Future Work

Clean up the ontology. Publishing it. Find best mechanism to “keep it alive”.

Reviewing concepts, adding new concepts, controlling versioning, etc…

Continue the work towards a sensor ontology. Build services ( Web Services to query and

map ) around these ontologies. Promote the ontology to enrich it.

28

Marine M


Future Work

Sensor Interoperability Metadata workshop

October 2006

http://marinemetadata.org/workshop06

29

Marine M


MMI: http://marinemetadata.org

Observing Sources Work: /sources

Ontology: /sources/platforms20060508.owl

Ont List: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

Thank you

Documents

An Ontology for Marine Observables