EarthCube is focused on community-driven development of an integrated, and interoperable knowledge management system for data in the geo- and environmental sciences. By utilizing a cooperative, as opposed to competitive, process like that which created the Internet and Open Source software, EarthCube will attack the recalcitrant and persistent problems that so far have prevented adequate access to and the analysis, visualization, and interoperability of the vast storehouses of disparate geoscience data and data types residing in distributed and diverse data systems. This award funds a series of broad community interactions to gather adequate information and requirements to create a roadmap for a critical cyberinfrastructure capability (semantics and ontologies) in the development of EarthCube. In the context of cyberinfrastructure, semantics and ontologies are what allows heterogeneous and distributed data systems to become interoperable. They enable scientists to register, discover, access, and integrate data irrespective of its structural heterogeneity. This work convenes public, online/virtual meetings and seeks broad community input in the development of a process to have the geoscience and cyberinfrastructure communities converge on a way forward in the realm of semantics and ontologies for data, with the end product being a capability implementation roadmap. Also involved in the process is the identification of appropriate community agreed upon use cases. Broader impacts of the work include development of approaches, protocols, and standards that may be applicable across the sciences and the fostering of close interaction between communities that do not commonly interact, to a great extent, with one another moving them toward a common goal of the creation of a new paradigm in data and knowledge management in the geosciences.
The main purpose of the proposal was to set up and manage a series of three Web seminars applying WebEx for the Semantic and Ontology Group. The 1st Web Seminar - Semantic Web and Ontology Group was set up on Tuesday, April 24, 2012, 2:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time. The WebEx #2 - Drawing the roadmap for semantic/ontology infrastructure for Geosciences was organized on May 8, 2012 starting at 12:27pm. The Semantics Community Group WebEx #3 was run on May 17, 2012 from 2pm to 3pm. These three interactive Web seminars allowed the Semantic and Ontology Working Group and others to communicate, through phone and Web chat, the requirement for the community ontologies and knowledge bases. As a follow up, I actively participated in the Structural Geology and Tectonics community’s workshops in October 2012 in Chicago, IL to discuss the requirement to build community databases. I also attended a second meeting in March 2013 in Lawrence, KS to discuss the requirements for brittle deformation databases for the structural geology community. Our group is seeking funds to set up another workshop for ductile deformation database for the community. As a follow-up I submited a Building Blocks proposal in May 2013 to build a Web-based, domain expert-centered framework to directly involve, a large number of domain experts in the automatic creation of highly expressive and interconnected domain ontologies, guided with knowledge engineers.
