HR: 09:15h
AN: H11K-06    [Abstracts]
TI: Development of a One-Stop Data Search and Discovery Engine using Ontologies for Semantic Mappings (HydroSeek)
AU: * Piasecki, M
EM: michael.piasecki@drexel.edu
AF: Drexel University Dept. of Civil, Arch. & Envirm. Engrg., 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States
AU: Beran, B
EM: bb63@drexel.edu
AF: Drexel University Dept. of Civil, Arch. & Envirm. Engrg., 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States
AB: Search engines have changed the way we see the Internet. The ability to find the information by just typing in keywords was a big contribution to the overall web experience. While the conventional search engine methodology worked well for textual documents, locating scientific data remains a problem since they are stored in databases not readily accessible by search engine bots. Considering different temporal, spatial and thematic coverage of different databases, especially for interdisciplinary research it is typically necessary to work with multiple data sources. These sources can be federal agencies which generally offer national coverage or regional sources which cover a smaller area with higher detail. However for a given geographic area of interest there often exists more than one database with relevant data. Thus being able to query multiple databases simultaneously is a desirable feature that would be tremendously useful for scientists. Development of such a search engine requires dealing with various heterogeneity issues. In scientific databases, systems often impose controlled vocabularies which ensure that they are generally homogeneous within themselves but are semantically heterogeneous when moving between different databases. This defines the boundaries of possible semantic related problems making it easier to solve than with the conventional search engines that deal with free text. We have developed a search engine that enables querying multiple data sources simultaneously and returns data in a standardized output despite the aforementioned heterogeneity issues between the underlying systems. This application relies mainly on metadata catalogs or indexing databases, ontologies and webservices with virtual globe and AJAX technologies for the graphical user interface. Users can trigger a search of dozens of different parameters over hundreds of thousands of stations from multiple agencies by providing a keyword, a spatial extent, i.e. a bounding box, and a temporal bracket. As part of this development we have also added an environment that allows users to do some of the semantic tagging, i.e. the linkage of a variable name (which can be anything they desire) to defined concepts in the ontology structure which in turn provides the backbone of the search engine.
UR: http://www.hydroseek.org
DE: 1819 Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
DE: 1847 Modeling
DE: 1880 Water management (6334)
DE: 1899 General or miscellaneous
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting