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EarthScienceOntolog: Panel Session-05 - Wed 2012-12-12

Mini-Series Theme: An Earth Science Ontology Dialog ("EarthScienceOntolog")

Session-5 Program:

  • (A) Moving Forward with Semantics for Earth Science Data ... intro slides
    • Co-chaired by: Dr. NancyWiegand (U of Wisconsin, Madison), and Mr. MikeDean (Raytheon BBN)
  • (B) Mini-series wrap-up: "Looking Back at the Earth Science - Ontolog mini-series: What Did We Accomplish and Where are We Now?" ... slides
    • by Professor KrishnaSinha (Virginia Tech) and Dr. LeoObrst (MITRE)

Panelists / Briefings (segment-A):

  • Professor KrishnaSinha (Virginia Tech) - "Building Blocks for EarthCube" slides
  • Dr. NancyWiegand (U of Wisconsin, Madison) - "Semantics in EarthCube" slides
  • Dr. LeoObrst (MITRE) - "Semantic Technology: A Tutorial" slides
  • Mr. DaveKolas (Raytheon BBN) - "Getting Started with GeoSPARQL" slides

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Abstract

Moving Forward with Semantics for Earth Science Data - intro slides

This is the 5th and final session of the Joint EarthCube-Ontolog Mini-series on "Ontology and Semantic Technology for the Earth Science Community" - a series of panel sessions dubbed: "EarthScienceOntolog" - an Earth Science Ontology Dialog.

This mini-series of events are co-organized/supported by members of the Earth Cube community, Ontolog community, SOCoP community, IAOA community.

We will continue the mini-series process (see kick-off session abstract) with the aim of enabling meaningful dialog between members of both communities (Earth Science and ontology/semantics). To this end we seek to further an understanding of Earth Science system requirements expressed in such things as use cases, geo-science identified problems and issues, extant system architectures and their lifecycles, the status of relevant ontological engineering, architectures and approaches, and prospective tools.

In this last session of the Earth Science Ontology Dialog mini-series, we will start by discussing the building blocks for the Earth Cube program. That will be followed by two tutorials - one on semantic technologies, ontologies, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL); the other on GeoSPARQL.

At the end, the mini-series is summarized with some discussion on next steps in working toward semantics for Earth Science data.

More details about this mini-series can be found at: EarthScienceOntolog (home page for this mini-series)

Briefings

  • Professor KrishnaSinha (Virginia Tech) - "Building Blocks for EarthCube" slides
Abstract: ... Earth Cube building blocks are components of an overarching architecture designed to support objectives of Earth Cube identified by National Science Foundation (Jacobs[1], 2012; Killeen[2], 2012), as well as those highlighted in the European Commission report Riding the Wave;
o Data publication and access: developing new technologies to enable individuals and large data centers to publish data, as well as enabling access through semantic technologies. These technologies must be coupled with a reward system to encourage data sharing.
o Collection: develop community endorsed simple metadata requirements for data providers to facilitate access to both curated as well non curated data
o Diversity: provide capabilities to access and discover heterogeneous resources
o Interoperability: provide capabilities (semantic as well as syntactic ) to understand the content of databases, as well as support discovery of resources beyond keyword searches
o Trust: provide innovative algorithms to enhance users trust of data they are unfamiliar with, as well as management of resources to enhance trust in the source of the data
o Security: New technologies to enhance data integrity, as well as capabilities to detect data biased by a group or individual
o Education and training: New capabilities to generate interest in geoscience through training of data scientists and librarians, as well as providing capabilities to bring information to a class room setting
o Usability: Provide new technologies to enable non-specialists to use data, as well as scientists to work with unfamiliar data
o Preservation and Sustainability: Develop capabilities to preserve current data, as well as legacy data
o Commercial exploitation: Utilize commercial developments to enable revenue generation for sustainability of resources
To meet such objectives, synergy between science and informatics is required to develop a more robust understanding of the earth as a system of systems. Interaction of these systems is recorded in both geological and biological data, yet the capability to integrate across disciplines is hampered by diverse social and technological approaches to research and communication. A significant challenge that must be met in order to promote such an understanding encompasses the integrated development of social, engineering and science based infrastructures.
References:
[1] Jacobs, C., 2012, Earth Cube: Developing a Framework to Create and Manage Knowledge in the Geosciences, Earth Observation, Technology, http://www.earthzine.org/2012/02/01/earthcube-developing-a-framework-to-create-and-manage-knowledge-in-the-geosciences/
[2] Killeen, T., 2012, Data Citation in the Geosciences, http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12058/nsf12058.jsp
  • Dr. NancyWiegand (U of Wisconsin, Madison) - "Semantics in EarthCube" slides
    • Abstract: ... This brief talk transitions between the talk on Earth Cube building blocks just given by Professor Krishna Sinha to the two tutorials that will be coming up by Dr. Leo Obrst and Mr. DaveKolas. How semantics might fit into Earth Cube is discussed using one of the Earth Cube architecture diagrams.
  • Dr. LeoObrst (MITRE) - "Semantic Technology: A Tutorial" slides
    • Abstract: ... This short tutorial is an introduction to semantic technologies, ontologies, and OWL. The focus is on the contributions of semantic technologies and ontologies in particular to solving real information technology problems. The tutorial does not presuppose any previous detailed technical background in these topics, but a general technical background in information technology is assumed.
  • Mr. DaveKolas (Raytheon BBN) - "Getting Started with GeoSPARQL" slides
    • Abstract: ... In this talk, I will introduce the basic components which make up the GeoSPARQL specification: the ontology, the relation predicates, and the query functions. I will then walk through a simple example domain. I will create a new domain ontology, link it to GeoSPARQL, create some example data, and execute example queries. My talk will assume basic knowledge of SPARQL, RDF, and Turtle.
  • Professor KrishnaSinha (Virginia Tech) and Dr. LeoObrst (MITRE) - "Looking Back at the Earth Science - Ontolog mini-series: What Did We Accomplish and Where are We Now?

" slides

    • Abstract: ... The Earth Science - Ontolog mini-series focused on the current status and application of multi-level ontologies towards developing a semantically enabled cyberinfrastructure for the Earth Science Community (ref. our mini-series description, goals and objectives). We had five sessions in the series, of which this is the final. We addressed the value proposition for ontologies and Earth Science, looked at ontology development and application for the full lifecycle of Earth Science, addressed the deep topic of semantic interoperability and data integration for Earth Science, reviewed some of the Earth Science ontologies currently available or being worked, and, in this last session, have provided some tutorials and overviews for the Earth Science and its ontology-supporting community. We end with some prospective next steps.

Agenda

EarthScienceOntolog - Panel Session-05

  • Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call

Proceedings

Please refer to the above

IM Chat Transcript captured during the session

see raw transcript here.

(for better clarity, the version below is a re-organized and lightly edited chat-transcript.)

Participants are welcome to make light edits to their own contributions as they see fit.

-- begin in-session chat-transcript --

[08:50] Welcome to the

EarthScienceOntolog: Panel Session-5 - Thu 2012-12-12

Mini-Series Theme: An Earth Science Ontology Dialog ("EarthScienceOntolog")

Session-5 Program:

(A) Moving Forward with Semantics for Earth Science Data

Co-chaired by: Dr. Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin, Madison), and Mr. Mike Dean (Raytheon BBN)

(B) Mini-series wrap-up:

"Looking Back at the Earth Science - Ontolog mini-series: What Did We Accomplish and Where are We Now?"

by Professor Krishna Sinha (Virginia Tech) and Dr. Leo Obrst (MITRE)

Panelists / Briefings (segment-A):

Professor Krishna Sinha (Virginia Tech) - "Building Blocks for EarthCube"

Dr. Nancy Wiegand (U of Wisconsin, Madison) - "Semantics in EarthCube"

Dr. Leo Obrst (MITRE) - "Semantic Technology: A Tutorial"

Mr. Dave Kolas (Raytheon BBN) - "Getting Started with GeoSPARQL"

Logistics:

  • (if you haven't already done so) please click on "settings" (top center) and morph from "anonymous" to your RealName
  • Mute control: *7 to un-mute ... *6 to mute
  • Can't find Skype Dial pad?
    • for Windows Skype users: it's under the "Call" dropdown menu as "Show Dial pad"
    • for Linux Skype users: please note that the dial-pad is only available on v4.1 (or later or the earlier Skype versions 2.x,)

if the dialpad button is not shown in the call window you need to press the "d" hotkey to enable it.

0

Proceedings:

0

[08:01] anonymous morphed into Nancy Wiegand

[08:06] anonymous morphed into Nancy Wiegand

[08:19] anonymous morphed into Nancy Wiegand

[08:54] anonymous morphed into krishna

[08:55] krishna morphed into Krishna Sinha

[08:55] anonymous1 morphed into Charles Vardeman

[08:55] anonymous morphed into Damian Gessler

[08:58] anonymous morphed into DavidButler

[09:01] alex.shkotin: Hi all:-)

[09:01] anonymous morphed into Dave Kolas

[09:01] anonymous1 morphed into Tom Tinsley

[09:03] anonymous morphed into Arthur Small

[09:05] anonymous1 morphed into Mara Abel

[09:05] anonymous2 morphed into Douglas Fils

[09:06] anonymous morphed into Robert Rovetto

[09:09] Anne Thessen: I can see the slides, Krishna. All is good.

[09:09] Peter P. Yim: == Nancy Wiegand started the session with an introduction of the session

[09:09] List of attendees: Anne Thessen, Arthur Small, Charles Vardeman, Damian Gessler, Dave Kolas,

DavidButler, DeborahLNichols, Douglas Fils, Fran Lightsom, GaryBergCross, Leo Obrst, Mara Abel,

Mike Dean, Nancy Wiegand, Peter P. Yim, Robert Rovetto, Tom Tinsley, alex.shkotin, anonymous, anonymous1,

anonymous2, krishna, Krishna Sinha, vnc2

[09:09] Peter P. Yim: == Krishna Sinha presenting his talk on "Building Blocks for EarthCube"

[09:16] alex.shkotin morphed into Alex Shkotin

[09:17] anonymous morphed into Elizabeth Florescu

[09:24] Peter P. Yim: == Nancy Wiegand presenting: "Semantics in EarthCube"

[09:30] Peter P. Yim: == Leo Obrst presents "Semantic Technology: A Tutorial"

[09:30] anonymous morphed into Scott Hills

[10:07] Peter P. Yim: == Dave Kolas doing the tutorial: "Getting Started with GeoSPARQL"

[10:32] Leo Obrst: @Dave: I see on slide 13 that at least some of the Region Connection Calculus

(RCC) axioms are supported. Are these actually expressed in detail usable by a reasoner?

[10:33] Dave Kolas: Leo: They are not usable by a OWL-SWRL style reasoner (qualitatively) at the

moment.

[10:33] Dave Kolas: Current implementations reason about these quantitatively with the geometries

[10:33] Dave Kolas: The specification supports qualitative reasoning, but you would need to supply

your own axioms for reasoning

[10:36] Krishna Sinha: @DaveKolas: How do you see the geospatial ontology linking to time ontology? I

am asking this because many geologic features have changed locations through time.

[10:38] Dave Kolas: @Krishna: You can use GeoSPARQL together with OWL-Time (or some other temporal

ontology) if you need it. Parliament has temporal indexing for OWL-Time as well.

[10:38] Arthur Small: @DaveKolas: How, if at all, can GeoSPARQL be used to handle spatio-temporal

objects, such as a flight trajectory, or a moving storm front?

[10:41] Dave Kolas: @ArthurSmall: There currently is not a good way in GeoSPARQL a way to describe

trajectories, though that might make a good reusable extension. While you could describe the points

along a path that something takes and attach temporal information to these points, this would get

very verbose quickly.

[10:36] Arthur Small: @LeoObrst: Every database schema has an implicit ontology. Are there any tools

that can scan an existing database and extract the implicit ontology and suggest an OWL ontology?

[10:42] Arthur Small: Mic trouble. ... Could you just ask the Q?

[10:42] Leo Obrst: @Arthur: I'll respond a bit to your question shortly.

[10:52] Leo Obrst: @Arthur: I commented on some tools such as TopBraid which can ingest XML Schemas

and assist in generating ontologies, but imperfectly and requires munging afterwards. Mike mentioned

some relational db -> semantic web standards that have emerged.

[10:59] Arthur Small: @LeoObrst: Thank you!

[10:54] Mike Dean: @ArthurSmall: upcoming Recommendations (R2RML and the Direct Mapping) from the W3C

RDB2RDF working group provide standard means of exposing relational data as RDF. See

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/

[10:58] Mike Dean: @ArthurSmall: These standardize what tools like D2RQ http://d2rq.org have provided

for a long time. Much of the data in the Linked Data Cloud actually lives in relational databases.

[10:59] Arthur Small: @MikeDean: Thanks!

[10:44] Dave Kolas: @Arthur: what I described might work ok if you were trying to track the locations

that a car stopped at along a trip, but would be bad if you needed very specific detail about

continuous motion

[10:42] Scott Hills: Is there a standard web service interface for "publishing" an ontology, for

consumption by applications? A simple example might involve consumption of distributed SKOS

ontologies by a semantic search app.

[10:44] Arthur Small: @ScottHills: Maybe http://www.ontologymatching.org/?

[10:45] Peter P. Yim: @ScottHills - you might also want to check out the Open Ontology Repository (OOR)

initiative - see: http://oor.net for various implementations

[10:45] Douglas Fils: @ScottHills you might want to reference http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/

too

[10:48] Arthur Small: Or perhaps for registering the meta-data to an existing, professionally-created

ontology?

[10:51] Peter P. Yim: == Krishna Sinha & Leo Obrst doing the EarthScienceOntolog Mini-series wrap-up

[10:56] Alex Shkotin: Great mini-series! Thank you:-)

[11:00] Leo Obrst: Thanks all!

[11:01] Peter P. Yim: join us in the upcoming Ontology Summit 2013 activities - see:

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit

[11:03] Peter P. Yim: a pre-launch community brainstorm session for the Ontology Summit is coming up

tomorrow - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2012_12_13 ... please come

(especially if you want to influence the outcome)! ... Also, mark your calendars for the

Ontology Summit 2013 Launch Event - Thursday 17-Jan-2013 2-Hr session starting 9:30am PST / 12:30pm

EST / 6:30pm CET / 17:30 GMT/UTC

[11:03] Peter P. Yim: great mini-series, thank you all for the contribution!

[11:04] Peter P. Yim: -- session ended: 11:00am PST --

[11:04] List of chat-room participants: Alex Shkotin, Anne Thessen, Arthur Small, Charles Vardeman,

Dalia Varanka, Damian Gessler, Dave Kolas, DavidButler, DeborahLNichols, Douglas Fils,

Elizabeth Florescu, Fran Lightsom, GaryBergCross, Krishna Sinha, Leo Obrst, Mara Abel, Mike Dean,

Nancy Wiegand, Peter P. Yim, Robert Rovetto, Scott Hills, Tom Tinsley, vnc2

-- end of in-session chat-transcript --

  • Further Question, Remarks & Interaction with the Community:
    • please post them to the [ Sem-cg ] listserv
    • if you are not a member of the Ontolog community (meaning to say that you are not subscribed to the [ ontolog-forum ] discussion list) yet), we cordially invite you to join us. See our "Membership" details at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
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Additional Resources

  • Homepage of this EarthScienceOntolog mini-series
    • Archive of the mini-series Kick-off session: "Value Proposition" - ConferenceCall_2012_08_23
    • Archive of the mini-series session-2: "Ontology development and application across Earth Science Lifecycle" - ConferenceCall_2012_09_06
    • Archive of the mini-series session-3: "Heterogeneity-preserving Data Interoperability: Methods and Challenges" - ConferenceCall_2012_10_11
    • Archive of the mini-series session-4: "A Review of Ontologies for Earth Sciences" - ConferenceCall_2012_11_01
  • EarthCube Project Homepage - http://earthcube.ning.com/
  • Home page of the Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP) - http://socop.org
  • Home page of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) - http://iaoa.org
  • Take a look, also, at the rich body of knowledge that the Ontolog community has built out over the years, by going through the archives of noteworthy past Ontolog events.

For the record ...

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  • Date: Wednesday, 12-Dec-2012
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