Public Access and Spatial Metadata Values: Semantic Network Services Response to EU Directives Maria Rüther Federal Environment Agency, Thomas Bandholtz innoQ Deutschland GmbH, Semantic Network Service 4th Ecoterm Group Meeting Vienna, Austria, April 2007 The role of environmental terminologies in semantic data integration Track: WHAT ARE THE USE CASES?

SNS - p. 2 2 European Directives “Public Access” (2003) “Inspire” (2007)

SNS - p. 3 Public Access & Environmental Terminology biology geology chemistry economics politics … buzzwords partial knowledge media sciences learning personal public ? community environ mental informa tion

SNS - p. 4 Full Text Search Support Finding the right search terms … terminology mediation service –getSimilarTerms() lookup and navigation services –findTopics() –getPSI() –getHierarchy() terms extraction services –autoClassify() this is really helpful

SNS - p. 5 Terminology based metadata Document index and data catalogue significant thematic keywords –autoClassify() place names –autoClassify() temporal coverage –autoClassify() this is somehow difficult to understand 

SNS - p. 6 INSPIRE: Directive for a European SDI “Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community” Based on OGC, ISO, W3C Standards Built on Member States’ Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) March Directive entered in to force Technical implementing rules on metadata; data specifications; network services; data and service sharing; and monitoring and reporting. INSPIRE Draft Metadata Implementing RulesINSPIRE Draft Metadata Implementing Rules March 2009 – Directive transposed into national legislation 2008 to 2012 – Phased adoption of implementing rules 2010 to 2019 – Phased compliance with implementing rules

SNS - p. 7 Inspire metadata model terminology references INSPIRE Draft Metadata Implementing Rules

SNS - p. 8 Inspire: abstract discovery metadata INSPIRE Draft Metadata Implementing Rules

SNS - p. 9 Inspire: Resource topic categories Resource topic category The topic category is a high-level classification scheme to assist in the grouping and the topicbased search of available spatial resources. The applicable topic categories are defined in section The specified topic category positions the resource within the framework of the INSPIRE themes given in Annexes I, II and III. INSPIRE Draft Metadata Implementing Rules

SNS - p. 10 Inspire: Keywords Keyword Commonly used word(s), formalized word(s) or phrase(s) used to describe the subject. While the topic category is too coarse for detailed queries, keywords help narrowing a full text search and they allow for structured keyword search. An ideal situation is to base this on an existing thesaurus or taxonomies. A keyword search represents a minimum search criteria defined by INSPIRE in Article 11-2 (a). INSPIRE Draft Metadata Implementing Rules Example from Sensor Web

SNS - p. 11 [2005: Referencing Keywords in Geographic Metadata] OGC Catalog Services, ISO geographic Metadata, ISO XML Schema URL of semantic reference

SNS - p. 12 URN in the Evaluation & Use levels some OGC examples: current discussions at OGC about migrating from URN to URL URN are not “resolvable”!

SNS - p. 13 What does “resolvable” mean? 1.Discovery agent finds a keyword encoded as a URL 2.Discovery agent opens URL for reading 3.“Codespace” server responds with the formal definition 4.Discovery agent tries to understand the format (OWL, RDF, any?) 5.Discovery agent reads the definition 6.Discovery agent detects Classes and ObjectProperties encoded as a URL 7.continue with 2. … 8.Discovery agent starts reasoning (“evaluating”) … This looks much more like Representational State Transfer (REST) than like Web Services!

SNS - p. 14 Some examples of working Web Ontologies (OWL) MMI list of vocabularies: SWEET environmental ontologies: (more in the Ecoterm community) MMI guidance (in progress, comments welcome) on URIs/URLs -- much is aimed at ontology publishers:

SNS - p. 15 MMI – a real pioneer

SNS - p. 16 Some To Dos Clarify the resolvable linkage between metadata and terminology One centralized Terminology vs. multiple “trusted” Resources Multilingualism: symmetric or asymmetric? Semantically aware discovery & evaluation agents Ontology Providers: become part of the infrastructure