ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS Semantic Network Service Applications of Environmental Semantics Maria Rüther, Federal Environmental Agency, Thomas Bandholtz, Consultant, 2ND ECOTERM MEETING The German Federal Environmental Agency (UBA- Umweltbundesamt) Berlin, Germany 15 April 2005

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 2 Term Part Term preferred broader composite related Non- Descriptor Descriptor Morphology Environmental Thesaurus “UMTHES”, ~ 40,000 terms Location intersects Morphology part of Types / Layers Coordinates Environmental Gazetteer, ~ 20,000 place names SNS Topic Map (ISO 13250) Types & Relations Event sequence Morphology related Types Temp. Extent Environmental Chronicle, ~ 1000 Events TopicTopic what happened happened in has characteristics (to be done)

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 3 Automatic Content Classification 1. read document discover terms find matching topics recognise term positions 3. relevance by frequency … by term positions … by clustering 2. understand composite terms resolve ambiguities replace non-descriptors significant topics of a document index

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 4 Clients of SNS Web Services German Environmental Information Network (Federal Level) 2003 Spatial Data Infrastructure (Federal Level) 2004 Spatial Data Infrastructure Thuringia, State Level 2004 Environmental Data Catalogue (Federal Level) planned 2006 Environmental Portal Baden-Wuerttemberg, State Level under development 2005 SNS semantic Web Services SNS semantic Web Services

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 5 Applications in the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Today: 2 SDI portals using SNS services SDI in Europe in rapid development (Inspire) several ongoing projects in Germany Highly relevant for geo-encoded environmental data Based on Open Geospatial Committee (OGC) & ISO/TC 211 Geographic information/Geomatics standards Challenge 1: Networking with the OGC Gazetteer standard Challenge 2: Terminology/Ontology standards: –“OGC programs leverage work products of the W3C including SVG, XML, XSLT, SOAP, WSDL, and soon more on RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language)”

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 6 SDI needs “directories” Catalog Services, Web Feature Services, Sensor Web need “directories” of: Sensor types Platform types Component types Observable types and measurable properties (e.g. atmospheric temperature, species population, etc.) units-of-measure … directory terms linked to data by URI references Sensor Web specification to be fixed in OGC Web Services, Phase 3 (OWS-3), April-Oct 2005 Mike Botts, OGC Sensor Web Enablement Working Group Chair

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 7 Referencing Keywords in Geographic Metadata OGC Catalog Services, ISO geographic Metadata, ISO XML Schema URL of semantic reference

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 8 Standards of Terminology/Ontology XML Topic Maps ISO (used by SNS today) –well defined ISO XML standard, rather simple, but: –no RDF, not widely used, will probably move to RDF/OWL Global Future? Ontology Web Language (W3C recommendation) –general Semantic Web standard based on RDF Next Step? SKOS-Core (W3C Editor's Working Draft) –based on RDF –trying to make it simple, current version rather restricted –important issues dropped from earlier versions Extended Semantic Relations Relationship to RDFS/OWL Ontologies HTTP URIs for Concepts …

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 9 Region US - California -- SantaCruzMountains -- Somona -- Mendocino Winery SantaCruzMountainVineyard ConsumableThing Potable Eatable Wine CabernetSauvignon subclass of has maker located in adjacent From the OWL Guide 2004: located in (2003) OGC WMS Service OGC WMS Service OGC Gazetteer Service LocationInstance US - California -- SantaCruzMountains -- Somona -- Mendocino parent/child OGC

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 10 Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) general Web services registry standard –driven by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SeeBeyond, Systinet –seen as part of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) “Taxonomies” for service descriptions (UDDI 2) re-labelled as “Value Sets” in UDDI 3 “a value set represents a set of values that can be used to provide meaning or context to a UDDI entity. Category, identifier, and relationship type systems are all value sets” ongoing: Taxonomy Management –Using OWL for the interchange format –API for navigation and management of taxonomies

ECOTerm April 15, 2005, SNS p. 11 Providing A Value Set For Use In UDDI Version 3 A) Unchecked –document describing the details of the value set –“A value set that allows unrestricted references” B) Checked –“A value set that, each time an attempt is made to save data containing a reference to it, requires validation of this reference” Cacheable value set: get_allValidValues Web service –“A checked value set that is checked against a private cache of values” Externally validated value set: validate_values Web service –“A checked value set that has an associated validation service that performs value checking” Key-based value set: internally checked –“A value set whose valid values are based on entity keys in a given registry. Key-based value sets are always checked, their validation is carried out internally by each node”