A Prototype Ontology Tool and Interface for Coastal Atlas Interoperability

Dawn J. Wright1, Luiz Bermudez2 (presenter), Liz O’Dea3, Yassine Lassoued3, Declan Dunne3,Valerie Cummins3, Tanya Haddad4

American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, December 10-14, 2007, San Francisco, CASpecial Session IN08: Ontology Integration: A Pressing Challenge for Earth and Space Science Informatics

1) Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, dawn@dusk.geo.orst.edu , 2) Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Moss Landing, CA, bermudez@mbari.org3) Coastal and Marine Resources Center, Cork, Ireland, l.odea@ucc.ie, 4)Tanya Haddad, Oregon Coastal Management Program, Portland, OR, Tanya.Haddad@state.or.us

PROTOTYPE FLOWINTEROPERABILITYIn recent years significant momentum has occurred in the development of Internet resources for decision makers, scientists and the general public who are interested in the coast. A key aspect of this trend has been the development of coastal web atlases (CWA), based on web enabled geographic information systems (GIS). A CWA is defined as: a collection of digital maps and datasets with supplementary tables, illustrations and information that systematically illustrate the coast, oftentimes with cartographic and decision support tools, all of which are accessible via the Internet.

While multiple benefits are derived from these tailor-made atlases (e.g., speedy access to multiple sources of coastal data and information; economic use of time by avoiding individual contact with different data holders), the potential exists to derive added value from the integration of disparate CWAs, in order to optimize decision making at a variety of levels and across themes.

PARTICIPANTS CO-SPONSORSFigure 1. Established coastal web atlases such as the Marine Irish Digital Atlas, and the Oregon Coastal Atlas address coastal management topics for distinct spatial areas, but currently do not have the ability to network their inventories

INTRODUCTION

This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation award #0527216 and #0607372, with additional support by the Marine Institute of Ireland’s Marine RTDI Networking and Technology Transfer Initiative under the National Development Plan and the Coastal and Marine Resources Centre of University College Cork.

The prototype presented here is an attempt to provide a common point to access coastal data, maps and information from distributed atlases. The prototype connects two established coastal web atlases: the Marine Irish Digital Atlas (MIDA) <http://mida.ucc.ie>, and the Oregon Coastal Atlas (OCA) <http://www.coastalatlas.net>, following best practices and semantic mediation experiences from the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project <http:// marinemetadata.org>.

Figure 2. The approach makes use of controlled vocabularies in local atlas OWL ontologies mapped to terms in a super ontology

However, current inventories within coastal atlases are insufficient for the purposes of networking between them. Typically each atlas has different classifications of data and information (e.g., critical information on coastal erosion that may be needed across a broad geographic region as supplied by several different atlases).

Figure 3. Prototype architecture

Both atlases provide interactive access to spatial data and metadata via standard GIS services for data and metadata, as well as ontologies to provide semantic mediation. The prototype is envisioned as a seed application and lessons learned can be applied in developing regional network of CWAs in Europe and North America, or across global distances.

Technical Steps:

1. Data providers publish a Catalog Service for the Web (CSW) which describes Web Map Services (WMS). The description is done by using ISO 19115 metadata. Each WMS metadata record has keywords, which come from topics from a local ontology.

2. The portal presents Coastal Hazard Topics in English labels, which come for the upper ontology (super terms).

3. Users selects one of the topics.

4. The portal finds narrower terms (subclass of the selected terms), via a SPARQL queries to the ontology repository.

5. The portal previously invoked CSW services, extracted the application ontology terms and the relation to the endpoint services (e.g., WMS), and stored this in a service-ontology. For each narrower term from item 3, the portal finds the associated services in the service-ontology.

6. The portal invokes each service found and gathers information (URL of the service, title, provider and description).

7. The portal presents metadata about the map layer found: Title, brief description, and the URL of the map.

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