HR: 0800h
AN: IN51A-0307    [Abstracts]
TI: Leveraging Emerging Standards to Advance Data Interoperability in the Marine Geosciences
AU: * Arko, R A
EM: arko@ldeo.columbia.edu
AF: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, 61 Route 9W, Palisades, NY 10964 United States
AU: Fishman, A V
IN51A-0307 AF: Center for International Earth Science Information Network, 61 Route 9W, Palisades, NY 10964 United States
AB: Data interoperability in the marine geosciences has long been hampered by the heterogeneity of our data sets (i.e. the large number and variety of expeditions, platforms, instruments, data types, etc); the corresponding lack of metadata standardization; and a tendency to focus on graphical user interfaces (because geoscience data is highly visual in nature) rather than programmatic interfaces. The Marine Geoscience Data Management System (mgDMS; www.marine-geo.org) is an umbrella project based at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory that is building data repositories and services for the NSF-funded Ridge2000, MARGINS, and U.S. Antarctic Programs. mgDMS is partnered with several closely-related NSF projects including the Ocean Floor Petrology Database (PetDB), Marine Seismic Data Center (SDC), Sediment Geochemistry Database (SedDB), and others -- all of which include international collaborators and data sets -- and thus provides an excellent testbed to develop interoperability. Toward that end, we are implementing metadata standards and programmatic interfaces to facilitate the discovery and exchange of well-documented data sets. ISO 19115 (published in May 2003 and adopted by ANSI in December 2003) is emerging as an international standard for geoscience metadata, and has been adopted by national standards bodies and agencies in the U.S. (FGDC), E.U., Japan, and others. ISO 19115 defines a comprehensive set of elements for both "discovery" (search) and "markup" (use) metadata, and is easily extensible. We have developed a metadata profile for mgDMS which implements the mandatory elements of 19115, and extends it to accommodate the unique aspects of marine geoscience expedition-based data sets. We have implemented the profile as a lightweight REST-type Web service based on a W3C XML schema and associated XSL stylesheet. Closely related to the development of metadata standards is the development of controlled vocabularies to describe platforms, instruments, etc. The Ontology Web Language (OWL; adopted by W3C in February 2004) has emerged as a standard method to express definitions for, and relationships between, vocabulary terms. We are working with the NSF-funded Marine Metadata Initiative (MMI) to develop OWL-based ontologies for marine geoscience vocabularies, which are then embedded in our ISO 19115 profile. Finally, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has published standards for the Web-based exchange of geospatial data, including Web Coverage Services (WCS; raster data), Web Feature Services (WFS; vector data), and Web Map Services (WMS; composed images). We are deploying OGC services for selected data sets hosted by mgDMS -- such as our continuously-updated global digital elevation model (DEM), constructed from multibeam bathymetry and satellite topography data -- making them easily available to any OGC-enabled client application. We have implemented these services entirely with open-source software, including the MapServer GIS platform, PostgreSQL RDBMS, and PostGIS spatial database extensions.
UR: http://www.marine-geo.org
DE: 3000 MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS
DE: 3094 Instruments and techniques
DE: 4200 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL
DE: 4262 Ocean observing systems
DE: 4294 Instruments and techniques
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005