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Sensor Ontology Work Begins
The Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project has announced a community effort to characterize marine sensors and other devices. The first outcome of the project will be an ontology, or hierarchical controlled vocabulary with proper descriptions, of all marine sensor types. The ontology will support many marine observatories and data management projects that require good descriptions of the sensors, instruments, and platforms that they use. Many individual projects have created lists of marine sensors, but these are often narrowly focused, hard to use by other projects, or do not follow good semantic practices. As part of its work, the marine devices ontology project will collect as many of those lists as it can find, and enable the owners of those lists to register vocabularies and relate terms to the ones in the standard ontology. In addition to these contributors, major organizations like the Alliance for Coastal Technologies, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, and SeaDataNet have been invited to participate, and are expected to provide substantial expertise. Developing an overarching devices ontology has become critical to the development of semantic technologies for marine data management and systems management. Semantic systems are different from older technologies in that they can capture, or "understand", the relationships between different concepts -- for example, that vertical profiler platforms can be deployed on moorings, or that CTDs contain temperature sensors -- and can answer queries or make decisions based on those relationships. For example, a user asking for "temperature" sensors will also find the sensors contained in CTDs, if the data system applies semantic tools and relationship to find the related instrumentation. Many new data systems are being build with this kind of semantic understanding. Advanced ocean observing systems of NOAA, NSF, and European initiatives all expect to incorporate more advanced semantic technologies and standards in their architectures. These will require the vocabularies and semantic frameworks being pioneered by community initiatives like MMI, so that specific concepts can be uniquely and permanently referenced. MMI previously produced an ontology of marine platforms (moorings, ships, underwater vehicles, and so on) and is still enhancing and serving that reference document. The information has been used in numerous data and observing systems, and will provide one basis for describing marine devices. In addition, the project expects to update its marine platforms, based on lessons learned during the sensors ontology development.
All interested members of the community are encouraged to participate in this project, and may visit http://marinemetadata.org/ontdevices for further information.
12 MTR January 2008
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