Controlled Vocabulary

Giri PalanisamyEda C. Melendez-Colom

Corinna GriesDuane CostaJohn 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

Datasets

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

• http://149.169.202.24:8080/ecologyes– Development server

• NBII Thesaurus Site

• http://nbii.ornl.gov/thesaurus

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