Controlled Vocabulary Giri Palanisamy Eda C. Melendez-Colom Corinna Gries Duane Costa John Porter

Desired Result- Dream Systems Ecological Ontologies – as an endpoint –But better goal for now set up community site for annotating data that could provide information for ontology construction Concept mapping –Can pull out keywords and have users list synonym Corrina has student working on text analysis, including proximity between words Developing “related words” –Lets you make choices about how words should be used –Synonyms don’t come together in a text

Desired Result/Dream System NBII Thesaurus web service –Already have a head start –May be more productive for LTER to help make them have a better system – that LTER can use –LTER is already in NBII system and there are capabilities to link there –EIONET also has thesaurus served through NBII –Will be adding another…… SEEK has annotation language that they use inside KEPLER….. –Also may be working annotating attributes –Used to enforce consistency

Duane’s Dream Rich and complete browse hierarchy for use in Metacat interface –Not 10 levels! Maybe 4 or 5 levels Enhance metacat queries to extend keywords with potential related keywords Keyword enrichment tool that would enrich keyword section of EML document –Add keywords –Tool suggests additional keywords to add

Thesauri/Ontologies Data sets

Issues Different standards for online ontologies (SKOS vs TAPR etc.) –Can you convert? NBII is looking at…. Would like to have option of matching thesarus keywords in EML documents Thesaurus is not explicitly a hierarchy….

Discussion on Automation NBII has worked on some tools… Could make enrichment of EML documents by keywords a USER function –Learn from users Now have audited metacat searches so have a database with 3 months worth of queries

Demo of Systems CAP Semantic Research –Development server NBII Thesaurus Site

Ideas Publication on LTER vocabulary and relationship to NBII Thesaurus and other resources –Send list to NBII, they will return report on hits –How can LTER contribute? Corrina’s system could be used to help propose new information Can add information to NBII Thesaurus….

Challenges Evaluating lists/thesauri/ontologies that would benefit LTER Linking existing EML documents with context from a list/thesaurus/ontology Developing a dataset hierarchy from the interaction of LTER data catalog with list/thesaurus/ontology

Steps Need training on how to use web services for NBII access –Duane, Corinna, Inigo Send list of terms for checking in NBII –Need to finalize multi-word keyword list –Revise Token/Word list – to update –Human input? Further Discussion – Workshop at NCEAS? –Relationships between LTER, SEEK and NBII Editing, sharing, CAP work –How to harvest user input to help “educate” system –CAP Student can participate

Next Steps Corinna will check with SEEK on opportunities there Giri will check with Mike Frame on NBII buy-in VTC Last Week of August 2007?? –Develop plans for future activities Workshops Visits Activities