Eco-informatics Project
Semantics Management and Semantics Service (SMSS) Project Description
[$1 million awarded from NSF]
Principal Investigators:
Bruce Bargmeyer, LBL
Yoram Rubin, UCB
Purpose:
The purpose of this proejct is to advance information system technology in support of environmental, action, science, decision-making, and program management. Emerging semantic technologies are enabling us to focus on environmental and health concepts and the relations between concepts in ways not previously possible. The research, development, demonstration, and education related to this project is to advance semantics management and semantics services as needed to improve the integration of - and to improve interaction with- the enormous and diverse store of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data into the area of the environmental and health. This research will enable linkage of concept systems to data in databases as well as to enable a new genera of semantic computing applications that reasons across concept systems while interacting with data in databases and knowledgebases. This project aims to make major advances in methods, architectures, toolkits, standards and technologies that are needed to make practical and strategic use of semantics for ecoinformatics applications.
Major Research Challenges:
- register the existing diversity of concept systems, based on their underlying structures,
- register the expected explosion of ontologies (as this approach comes into vogue),
- interrelate concepts systems with each other to support efforts to converge on consistency through harmonization and vetting activities,
- interrelated concepts in concept systems with concepts in databases, knowledgebases, and text,
- provide semantic services needed to support semantic computing, such as de referencing the URIs used in creating RDF statements by proving relevant information describing the referenced concept and its authoritative standing within some community of interest.
The project will develop an extended metadata registry (XMDR) prototype, populate it with many metadata sets (environmental, health, geographical), develop semantic services to query to the XMDR, test the prototype for usability and performance and demonstrate the capabilities.
For more information, please contact one of the PIs above.