We intend to deploy an ESIP-dedicated and ESIP-branded “Community Ontology Repository” (COR) pilot instance, to be used in a semantic technologies evaluation study.
There are interesting differences between the existing ESIP deployment of a BioPortal-based ontology repository, and MMI’s ontology repository based on an older BioPortal release. Recent discussions in the EarthCube community mentioned ESIP as a possible semantic registry and repository host and resulted in a proposal for a Semantic Infrastructure Working Group; and the Open Geospatial Consortium is holding a Geospatial Ontology Summit to focus on geospatial semantics issues. Given the broader repository interest outside of ESIP, it is timely to formally evaluate the ontology repository needs of the earth science community.
In the period ending September 30, we will make a dedicated instance of the MMI Ontology Registry and Repository available to the ESIP community, and document the process of deploying the system in the ESIP context. Working with the Semantic Cluster, we will initiate the processes required to document the needs of the wider earth science community. We aim to help ESIP achieve the following goals once the deployment is complete:
- Give non-experts the opportunity to experiment with semantic resources and explore semantic concepts using their own vocabularies and semantic content;
- Give the ESIP user communities the opportunity to consider what features and functionality they find valuable in such repositories;
- Give the ESIP semantic and technical communities the opportunity to evaluate the two repositories on a side-by-side basis, using criteria to be developed; and
- Give ESIP the opportunity to consider its possible roles, opportunities, and costs in providing semantic services to the larger earth science information community.