JISC

This project (COMPASS) will investigate the development of semantic tools for assisting those conducting research into coastal environments. It will demonstrate the benefits of developing an ‘ontologically-driven’ infrastructure for the marine domain, to address issues of discovery, access and use of scientific resources including data, metadata and citations to journal articles and other resources.

Overview

Academic groups with an interest in coastal marine environments are wide-ranging and include Coastal Planning, Oceanography, Biology/Ecology, Fisheries, Maritime and Intermodal Transport, Geology and Archaeology. In order to provide such a diverse group with advanced, value-added and relevant information services, interoperability at the semantic level is paramount. Through a series of coordinated work packages, COMPASS will demonstrate the benefits of developing an ontologically driven research support environment which assists in the critical tasks of locating, accessing and using heterogenous marine resources for a number of communities of practice with an interest in coastal marine environments.

Aims and objectives

The aim of COMPASS is to investigate the development of semantic tools for assisting those conducting research into coastal marine environments. In more detail, project objectives are:

• Creation of coastal marine community ontology for tagging a wide variety of related resources;
• Integration of these and other ontologies in an ontological registry;
• Extend and semantically enrich existing geospatial feature type models;
• Demonstrate how applications can be built from a set of web services using semantics derived from both the communities of practice and service ontologies;
• Work within the context of relevant standards organisations to gain maximum synergy and sustainable outputs;
• Make recommendations to the JISC concerning the sustainability of the approach and how the methodology may be extended to other areas within the UK research community;
• Where appropriate, determine requirements for additional registry services.

Project methodology

Broadly, the intention within COMPASS is to use best international practice and engage the communities of practice in ontology building and resource annotation. These ontologies and annotated resources will then be used in combination with other ontologies to semantically enrich a standards based registry. In parallel investigations into automatically semantically describe the various aspects of web services (capabilities, interface, location) will be made. These sophisticated service description models can be stored in the same standards based registry, enabling integration with the domain knowledge. The intention is then to demonstrate a semantically enhanced ability to publish, automatically discover, dynamically bind and invoke services using geospatial data services and more traditional digital library services. Existing UK e-infrastructure and related national and international activities (including MarineXML, MOTIIVE and MDIP) will be built upon to show how advances in semantic interoperability can benefit the UK research lifecycle.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

COMPASS will deliver a series of outputs from a related set of work packages including:

• A domain ontology for the coastal and marine communities of practice, a scientific resource ontology and a variety of semantically annotated marine resources will be produced accompanied by a report synthesizing lessons learnt.
• An extension package for a catalog specification, a reference implementation for the knowledge infrastructure and a report describing registry functionality
• A compendium of use cases describing anticipated use of a semantically enriched oceans portal and a client application based on that portal demonstrating interoperability between distributed data and processing web services
• A set of client applications demonstrating discovery and access to a variety of coastal marine resources including citations to journal articles.

Technology / Standards used

COMPASS will build on best practice from the open geospatial interoperability standards community, i.e. the Open Geospatial Consortium and ISO/TC211, as well as the marine standards community e.g. the International Hydrographic Organisation. The developed registry will be based on OASIS ebRIM and the OGC catalogue specification. In discovery those resources available within the JISC IE, focus will be placed on those resources that can be accessed over the internet through exposed interfaces e.g. z39.50, SRW and OAI-PMH.

Lead Institution

• EDINA National Data Centre

Project partners

• Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab, Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Munster, Germany
• Digital Enterprise Research institute, National University of Ireland, Galway
• School of Geosciences, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh
• Social Change Online