Collaborative workshop proposal: Drawing the roadmap for the semantic/ontology based infrastructure for Geosciences

Georgia State University Research Foundation, Inc., Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

EarthCube is focused on community-driven development of an integrated, and interoperable knowledge management system for data in the geo- and environmental sciences. By utilizing a cooperative, as opposed to competitive, process like that which created the Internet and Open Source software, EarthCube will attack the recalcitrant and persistent problems that so far have prevented adequate access to and the analysis, visualization, and interoperability of the vast storehouses of disparate geoscience data and data types residing in distributed and diverse data systems. This award funds a series of broad community interactions to gather adequate information and requirements to create a roadmap for a critical cyberinfrastructure capability (semantics and ontologies) in the development of EarthCube. In the context of cyberinfrastructure, semantics and ontologies are what allows heterogeneous and distributed data systems to become interoperable. They enable scientists to register, discover, access, and integrate data irrespective of its structural heterogeneity. This work convenes public, online/virtual meetings and seeks broad community input in the development of a process to have the geoscience and cyberinfrastructure communities converge on a way forward in the realm of semantics and ontologies for data, with the end product being a capability implementation roadmap. Also involved in the process is the identification of appropriate community agreed upon use cases. Broader impacts of the work include development of approaches, protocols, and standards that may be applicable across the sciences and the fostering of close interaction between communities that do not commonly interact, to a great extent, with one another moving them toward a common goal of the creation of a new paradigm in data and knowledge management in the geosciences.