Loose Integration of Local Information to Generate Collaborative Marine Science Knowledge

Loose Integration of Local Information to Generate Collaborative Marine Science Knowledge

Adam Leadbetter (British Oceanographic Data Centre, NERC, UK), Robert Arko (Columbia University, USA), Cynthia Chandler (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA), Adam Shepherd (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA) and Roy Lowry (British Oceanographic Data Centre, NERC, UK)
Copyright: © 2015 |Pages: 24
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6567-5.ch012

Abstract

This chapter focuses on improved access to marine science data, enabling researchers to generate new information and knowledge products. The history of controlled vocabulary developments in marine sciences, from paper publications to the Semantic Web, is explored in detail. This history is being furthered through the publication of Linked Open Data, meaning: the publication of clearly identifiable entities; a simple, universal mechanism for retrieving resources; a generic graph-based data model; and publishing explicit relationships to other resources. Progress towards Linked Open Data for marine science is reported in this chapter. As shown by the Data-Information-Knowledge ecosystem, the approach of “small pieces of data loosely joined” provides presentation and organisation to data, which creates information. The use of query endpoints to integrate this information from multiple locations into a knowledge base, which required active collaboration between cooperative partners to truly generate new knowledge and to address emerging science questions, is described.
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Introduction

Data collected during the course of oceanographic research expeditions have traditionally been archived close to the data originator: either in institutional or project based Data Assembly Centres (DACs) or on a national scale in the network of National Oceanographic Data Centres (NODCs) supported by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO’s International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE). This tradition led to the creation of several attempts to integrate the data from the DACs and NODCs either in portals or multinational data systems. Until recently, data were collected for one purpose, but research paradigms are shifting and expectations along with them for increased access to data and desire to integrate multidisciplinary data from disparate sources. While it is important to curate data close to the point of origin, it is important to 'set data free' and with sufficient documentation that the data can be interpreted accurately by others. A possible solution to providing sufficient documentation is through the use of Sensor Observation Services (SOS, http://marinemetadata.org/) which has its own Ontology Registry and Repository, with mappings from that resource to the NVS.

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