COMPASS: A Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure Managed with Ontologies Dr Kristin Stock Allworlds Geothinking Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham EDINA, University of Edinburgh

Introduction A knowledge infrastructure to provide semantically-assisted discovery, access and use of scientific resources. The marine domain Uses OWL ontologies: For discovery For the registry For web services Uses informal user tagging: For user annotation

The COMPASS Project Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship Funded by UK Joint Information Services Committee Exploring the use of semantic approaches to discovery and access of resources Partners: EDINA Allworlds Geothinking University of Muenster DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway Geosciences, University of Edinburgh Finishes June 2009

Resources Includes: Marine domain (our case study) Publications Data sets Web services (OGC) Marine domain (our case study) Resources are connected to both formal ontology terms and informal user tags

Discovery Currently done with keywords (e.g. Google Scholar) Depends upon the keywords that are added to the scientific resource No semantics, no ability to do richer searches You have to choose the right keywords or conform to a thesaurus

Semantic Discovery Enables the meaning of the concepts associated with a resource to be used in discovery Semantic networks show relationships between concepts: Subclass of Synonyms Other types of semantic relationships Users can search with a single concept, but can also see resources that are semantically related (not just those directly connected)

Semantic Discovery Using Scientific Knowledge As well as relating concepts from the marine domain, discovery using scientific knowledge is supported Scientific resources are connected to the scientific theories and models, so you can ask: ‘What other resources in different domains used this scientific theory?’ ‘How else has this scientific model been applied?’ Scope in the future for visualisation of the evolution of scientific ideas

Formal vs Informal Semantics (1) Description logic ontologies describe semantics formally They must be developed by a community of users A consensus view Some (great) effort to create, but good for inference We developed an ontology for marine instruments that supports the infrastructure

Formal vs Informal Semantics (2) User tags describe semantics informally Users just add whatever tags occur to them The tags they apply reflect their own individual conceptual view of the world We are comparing the two approaches

How are we doing this? Discovery Users can choose concepts from: the marine domain ontology the scientific knowledge ontology user tags Users can apply semantic ‘relaxation’: Related terms to a specified number of links Parents Children Users can specify geographic and temporal limits

How are we doing this? Ontology-Registry This is all supported by an ontology-registry Registry = Ontologies Ontologies = Registry Ontologies: Domain, SKI, information source Application ontologies for publications and data sets Tag ontology (from Gnizr) Web service ontologies

Web Service Ontology Putting OGC Web Feature Service and Web Map Service into OWL-S Created a mapping from OGC GetCapabilities into OWL-S An OWL-S OGC ontology to describe basic specifications, extended for each instance.

OWL Application Profile for CSW Registry Standards Uses OGC Catalogue Services for the Web We created: OWL Application Profile for CSW On OGC web site (or my web site), to be voted on at Boston meeting in June.

Conclusions Semantics can be used to support discovery and access in multiple ways. Formal ontologies Informal tags (‘the semantic web’) Semantic registries Web service ontologies. Focus on complying with existing standards (especially OGC). http://compass.edina.ac.uk Watch this space for findings...