1. COMPASS: A Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure Managed with Ontologies
Dr Kristin Stock
Allworlds Geothinking
Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham
EDINA, University of Edinburgh

2. Introduction
A knowledge infrastructure to provide semantically-assisted discovery, access and use of scientific resources.
The marine domain
Uses OWL ontologies:
For discovery
For the registry
For web services
Uses informal user tagging:
For user annotation

3. The COMPASS Project
Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship
Funded by UK Joint Information Services Committee
Exploring the use of semantic approaches to discovery and access of resources
Partners:
EDINA
Allworlds Geothinking
University of Muenster
DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway
Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Finishes June 2009

4. Resources Includes: Marine domain (our case study)
Publications
Data sets
Web services (OGC)
Marine domain (our case study)
Resources are connected to both formal ontology terms and informal user tags

5. Discovery Currently done with keywords (e.g. Google Scholar)
Depends upon the keywords that are added to the scientific resource
No semantics, no ability to do richer searches
You have to choose the right keywords or conform to a thesaurus

6. Semantic Discovery
Enables the meaning of the concepts associated with a resource to be used in discovery
Semantic networks show
relationships between concepts:
Subclass of
Synonyms
Other types of semantic relationships
Users can search with a single concept, but can also see resources that are semantically related (not just those directly connected)

7. Semantic Discovery Using Scientific Knowledge
As well as relating concepts from the marine domain, discovery using scientific knowledge is supported
Scientific resources are connected to the scientific theories and models, so you can ask:
‘What other resources in different domains used this scientific theory?’
‘How else has this scientific model been applied?’
Scope in the future for visualisation of the evolution of scientific ideas

8. Formal vs Informal Semantics (1)
Description logic ontologies describe semantics formally
They must be developed by a community of users
A consensus view
Some (great) effort to create, but good for inference
We developed an ontology for marine instruments that supports the infrastructure

9. Formal vs Informal Semantics (2)
User tags describe semantics informally
Users just add whatever tags occur to them
The tags they apply reflect their own individual conceptual view of the world
We are comparing the two approaches

10. How are we doing this? Discovery
Users can choose concepts from:
the marine domain ontology
the scientific knowledge ontology
user tags
Users can apply semantic ‘relaxation’:
Related terms to a specified number of links
Parents
Children
Users can specify geographic and temporal limits

11. How are we doing this? Ontology-Registry
This is all supported by an ontology-registry
Registry = Ontologies
Ontologies = Registry
Ontologies:
Domain, SKI, information source
Application ontologies for publications and data sets
Tag ontology (from Gnizr)
Web service ontologies

12. Web Service Ontology
Putting OGC Web Feature Service and Web Map Service into OWL-S
Created a mapping from OGC GetCapabilities into OWL-S
An OWL-S OGC ontology to describe basic specifications, extended for each instance.

13. OWL Application Profile for CSW
Registry Standards
Uses OGC Catalogue Services for the Web
We created:
OWL Application Profile for CSW
On OGC web site (or my web site), to be voted on at Boston meeting in June.

15. Conclusions
Semantics can be used to support discovery and access in multiple ways.
Formal ontologies
Informal tags (‘the semantic web’)
Semantic registries
Web service ontologies.
Focus on complying with existing standards (especially OGC).
Watch this space for findings...