Global Change Information System: Information Model and Semantic Application Prototypes

(GCIS-IMSAP)Status 01/08/2013

Stephan Zednik1, Curt Tilmes2, Peter Fox1, Justin Goldstein3, Marshall Ma1, Jin Zheng1

1 – Tetherless World Constellation, RPI2 – NASA Goddard, USGCRP3 – UCAR, USGCRP

GCIS Ontology

GCIS Ontology (cont.)

Key Message & Traceable Account

Key Message vs. “General” Message (early draft)

Prototype Use Case (UC-1)

Name Visit data center website of dataset used to generate report figure.

Goal Visit data center website of dataset used to generate report figure.

Summary A reader of the NCA is browsing the content via the website.  He/she sees a figure and wants to know where the data came from.  A reference to the publication in which the figure originated appears in the figure caption.  Selecting the link to the source publication displays a page of information about the publication including, if available, the publication DOI.  The page also includes references to the datasets cited in the publication.  Following each of dataset reference links presents a page of information about the dataset, including links back to the agency/data center webpage describing the dataset in more detail and making the actual data available for order or download.

Actors Primary Actor - reader of the NCA

Preconditions Reader is viewing the NCA online report

Post Conditions

Reader visits the data center dataset website

Normal Flow 1) System is presenting the NCA report to the reader in a web site. Presentation includes report figure with caption that includes reference to source publication.

2) Reader selects publication reference in figure caption3) System displays information about publication, including DOI (if available).4) Publication information includes publication dataset citations.5) Reader selects a dataset cited by the publication.6) System displays information about dataset including links to agency / data center webpages where more

information and (potentially) data download links are available.7) Reader selects the data center link and is redirected to data center dataset webpage.

Prototype 1

• Initial Implementation of UC-1• Exposes Linked Data API

– RESTful– RDF/XML, TTL, HTML, JSON supported

• Hosted at TWC / RPI– currently placeholder data – http://globalchange.tw.rpi.edu/elda/gcis/report/nc

a2009.html• Implemented using Epimorphics Linked Data

API (ELDA)– http://code.google.com/p/linked-data-api/ (spec)– https://code.google.com/p/elda/ (implementation)

Linked Data API Architecture

Prototype Screenshot

Next Steps

• Ontology– Finalize Traceable Accounts– Explore Key Message vs. General Message

• Instance population with real data• Develop more use cases• Refinement of existing prototype

– Search– Faceted browser

• CLEAN to GCMD vocabulary mapping

Prototype Use Case (UC-2)

Name Find Latest Datasets by Keyword

Goal Search for datasets associated with the keyword “snow”, list search results by recentness of publication.

Summary User story:

I want to look for information concerning “snow.”  I don’t know if it is a CLEAN word or a GCMD word or don’t even know what GCMD or CLEAN is.  How would I do it, and what would I see on my monitor during the process?

Assumptions The reader is not assumed to have knowledge regarding the GCMD Keywords (or other) vocabulary.

Actors Primary Actor - reader of the NCA

Preconditions TBD

Post Conditions

Reader is presented with a list of datasets associated with the keyword “snow” sorted by dataset publication date.

Normal Flow TBD

Notes We are looking into two user interface options for dataset selection by keyword

1) As a free-text search where the user inputs “snow”.2) Present the user a faceted browse interface with a vocabulary faceted which presents the user with terms

from a structured vocabulary. The user can manually select the term(s) which match or contain “snow”.

We intend to implement prototypes of both.

Free-text Search by Keyword (ELDA)

Faceted Browser (S2S)

VocabularyFacet

Data typeFacet

Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN)

• http://cleanet.org/index.html• The CLEAN project, a part of the National Science

Digital Library, provides a reviewed collection of resources coupled with the tools to enable an online community to share and discuss teaching about climate and energy science.

• Science Vocabularies for middle school to undergraduate students

• Vocabularies hosted at http://serc.carleton.edu/admin/manage/view_vocab.php?vocab_id=161

CLEAN Vocabulary

CLEAN Vocabulary (cont.)

CLEAN Vocabulary (cont.)

GCMD CLEAN Mapping

• Provide CLEAN as an alternative (and non-specialist) vocabulary by which terms can be searched browsed– SKOS Encoding of CLEAN Vocabulary– Map GCMD SKOS to CLEAN SKOS– GCIS data registered with GCMD

Keywords– Search & Browse available by GCMD

Keyword or CLEAN terms