Euromarine Consortium Workshop: Vocabularies and Ontology. Athens, Greece. 18 October 2011

1. “Ontologist’s” perspective Marine environmental data
Adam Leadbetter (alead@bodc.ac.uk), British Oceanographic Data Centre

2. Overview
- A history lesson
- An aside
- Use cases
- Recent developments
- The future?

3. A History Lesson
- The concept of “controlled vocabularies” is well
established in the oceanographic domain
- Decades!
- Initially published in hard copy form
- Then as .CSV via FTP
- Governance issues ensued!

4. A History Lesson
- Content governance improvements
- Projects that care about content
e.g. NERC Data Grid, SeaDataNet
- Committees and mailing lists
e.g. CF Standard Names, SeaVoX

5. A History Lesson
- Technical governance improvements
- Development of the NERC Vocabulary Server
(NVS)
- V 1.X uses a vocabulary data model
- Entries comprise: key, term, abbreviated term,
definition, semantic relationships

6. An Aside
- We work in the “thesauri” area of the
spectrum
- With > 30,000 concepts; > 100,000 mappings

7. Use Cases
- Metadata markup with verifiable content
- Dynamic drop down lists
- Semantic cross-walk
- “Smart” discovery
- Semantic enablement of WPSs

8. Use Cases
- EC FP7 Project NETMAR

9. Use Cases
- EC FP7 Project NETMAR: ICAN Pilot
NETMAR
Extended
Ontology
“Coastline”
- Shoreline
- High res coastline
NETMAR
Semantic
High res
Framework
coastline
“Coastline”?
Data including:
Shoreline &
High res
Shoreline
coastline
Washington
State Atlas
California Atlas
Local vocabulary
Local vocabulary

10. Recent Developments
- Design and construction of NVS V2.0
- Move from original version of SKOS to latest
- Payload includes governance & provenance
infromation
- Ability to deliver true thesauri as concept
schemes
- Provision for multilingual (human!) support

11. Recent Developments
- NVS V2.0 also upgrades the API
- RESTful and SOAP interfaces
- Nine methods available in API
- Concept deprecation now an option
- Visualisation, search and edit tools

12. Recent Developments

13. The future?
- Ontology extension
- Already have “soft” links to WoRMS & ITIS
- GEMET, MMI ORR
- Mulitingual concept titles, definitions
- More API methods?
- SPARQL?

14. Thank you!