Transcript ecoterm_presentation

Ecoterm
science for a changing world
Terminology for Ecoinformatics Sharing
Gail Hodge
Consultant to USGS BIO/NBII
Information International Associates, Inc.
Brussels, Belgium -- 22 September 2004
Environmental Terminology
Meeting
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15-16 April 2004 in Geneva
Hosted by UNEP with programming support by
EPA, EEA, JRC and USGS
> 30 participants
Participants included terminology developers, IT
professionals, and those interested in
multilingual issues from governments,
intergovernmental organizations (especially UN
agencies), scientific institutions, corporations
and vendors
Topics Covered
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Day One - information exchange
Day Two - forward looking strategic day –
looking at overlapping interests and formulating
projects
Overview of Existing Systems, including UN
initiatives
Use cases and user needs
Relevant technologies for interoperable
terminologies, including a prototype terminology
web service using the US National Agricultural
Library’s Ag Thesaurus and GEMET
Technology options
Next steps, proposals and research agenda
Administrative Activities
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Agreed the name of this group and project is
Ecoterm
Need statement of common vision (Cunningham
to draft)
UNEP to finalize and distribute meeting report
(Cunningham)
Plan an annual Ecoterm meeting possibly in
conjunction with a UNEP.Net meeting
(Cunningham)
Technical Activities
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Develop use cases, including scenarios, needed KOSs and
audience(s)
Develop example implementations of a thesaurus web service
(Lynch and EEA)
 Define high level services
 Develop SKOS reference implementation
 GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) as a
web service
 Work with SWAD-E project to get the full GEMET available in
their SKOS format
 Develop joint prototype web service around GEMET in ZOPE
Consider exchange between web-services based on the USDA
prototype through SOAP or XML/RPC or both
Host web-service on one of the EIONET servers and provide the
domain part of the URI for all GEMET terms
Technical Activities, contd.
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Review technology options
 “Standard” formats for KOSs on the web
 Identification of APIs and requirements
 Investigate the feasibility of registering KOSs in a UDDI
(Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) Registry
(Bandholtz)
 Consider the feasibility of publishing RDF encodings of KOSs on
the web
Review the taxonomy and definitions of relationship types
 Distribute Draft Content Standard for KOS Description (Hill &
Hodge) to the Ecoterm group for comments (Hodge)
 Review definitions with SKOS (Hodge, Bernard Vatant,
Margharita Sini and Alistair Miles)
Technical Activities, contd.
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Determine what information should come back
for a resource that would help the user to
evaluate multiple resources -- e.g., branding,
quality, context/scope parameter, etc.
Develop a list of standards and other resources
related to KOSs, (e.g., the Alexandria Digital
Library Guidelines for Web Services)
(Bargmeyer, Hodge and Paul Smits)
Marketing & Communications
Activities
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Update the terminology page on the Ecoinformatics site
 Rename project to Ecoterm (Jensen)
 Post the presentations from the meeting (Cunningham)
Set up an e-mail reflector with an archive (Cunningham or Stefan
Jensen)
Consider use of the bulletin board on the Ecoinformatics page for
communications
Promote our KOSs with groups involved in new technologies or
related activities
 Form liaison with W3C Semantic Web Activity - Best Practices
and Deployment Working Group (Bargmeyer, Bernard Vatant
and Alistair Miles)
 Promote our terminologies with the Earth Observation Summit
(GEO) (Paul Smits)
Marketing & Communications
contd.
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Collect Information about Existing KOSs
 Distribute questionnaire more broadly to other stakeholder
groups and those who could not attend (Cunningham and Paolo
Plini)
 Consider a more extensive questionnaire based on the revised
Content Standard (Hodge)
 Enter the questionnaire information into a database (terminology
registry) (Sean Khan and Hodge)
 Put URLs and descriptions for those resources that are web
accessible on the Ecoterm web page (Hodge and Jensen)
Extend ENVOC (UNEP's Environmental Vocabulary) and GEMET to
additional languages (Cunningham and Jensen)
Increase the visibility of environmental KOSs by investigating ways
to make individual terms accessible directly via a Google-like search
Other Activities
Geosciences Proposal to the EU on
sharing of tools
 Explore the possibility of making GEMET
publicly available through WIKI
technologies to support maintenance and
look-up (Jensen and Bernard Vatant)
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