HR: 10:20h
AN: IN52A-01    [Abstracts]
TI: Coordinating Communities and Building Governance in the Development of Schematic and Semantic Standards: the Key to Solving Global Earth and Space Science Challenges in the 21st Century.
AU: * Wyborn, L A
EM: lesleu.wyborn@ga.gov.au
AF: Geoscience Australia, PO Box 378, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
AB: The Information Age in Science is being driven partly by the data deluge as exponentially growing volumes of data are being generated by research. Such large volumes of data cannot be effectively processed by humans and efficient and timely processing by computers requires development of specific machine readable formats. Further, as key challenges in earth and space sciences, such as climate change, hazard prediction and sustainable development resources require a cross disciplinary approach, data from various domains will need to be integrated from globally distributed sources also via machine to machine formats. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the existing standards can be very domain specific and most existing data transfer formats require human intervention. Where groups from different communities do try combine data across the domain/discipline boundaries much time is spent reformatting and reorganizing the data and it is conservatively estimated that this can take 80% of a project's time and resources. Four different types of standards are required for machine to machine interaction: systems, syntactic, schematic and semantic. Standards at the systems (WMS, WFS, etc) and at the syntactic level (GML, Observation and Measurement, SensorML) are being developed through international standards bodies such as ISO, OGC, W3C, IEEE etc. In contrast standards at the schematic level (e.g., GeoSciML, LandslidesML, WaterML, QuakeML) and at the semantic level (ie ontologies and vocabularies) are currently developing rapidly, in a very uncoordinated way and with little governance. As the size of the community that can machine read each others data depends on the size of the community that has developed the schematic or semantic standards, it is essential that to achieve global integration of earth and space science data, the required standards need to be developed through international collaboration using accepted standard proceedures. Once developed the standards also require some form of governance to maintain and then extend the standard as the science evolves to meet new challenges. A standard that does have some governance is GeoSciML, a data transfer standard for geoscience map data. GeoSciML is currently being developed by a consortium of 7 countries under the auspices of the Commission for the Management of and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI), a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Perhaps other ‘ML' or ontology and vocabulary development ‘teams' need to look to their international domain specific specialty societies for endorsement and governance. But the issue goes beyond Earth and Space Sciences, as increasingly cross and intra disciplinary science requires machine to machine interaction with other science disciplines such as physics, chemistry and astronomy. For example, for geochemistry do we develop GeochemistryML or do we extend the existing Chemical Markup Language? Again, the question is who will provide the coordination of the development of the required schematic and semantic standards that underpin machine to machine global integration of science data. Is this a role for ICSU or CODATA or who? In order to address this issue, Geoscience Australia and CSIRO established the Solid Earth and Environmental Grid Community website to enable communities to ‘advertise' standards development and to provide a community TWIKI where standards can be developed in a globally ‘open' environment.
UR: http://www.seegrid.csiro.au
DE: 0525 Data management
DE: 0545 Modeling (4255)
DE: 1009 Geochemical modeling (3610, 8410)
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting