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EDINA newsline
December 2007: Volume 12 Issue 4
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The Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship (COMPASS) is a new JISC-funded project to investigate the development of semantic tools for assisting those conducting research into coastal marine environments.
Led by EDINA, and having just had its ‘kick-off’ meeting, the project plans to demonstrate the benefits of developing an ‘ontologically-driven’ infrastructure for the marine domain, to address issues of discovery, access and use of scientific resources. The resources in question are data (specifically geospatial data), metadata and also citations to journal article and other resources.
Partners in the COMPASS Project include the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, the University of Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at National University of Ireland, Galway, and Social Change Online.
This brings together established expertise in the following areas: semantics and ontologies; ontological/semantic registries, the use of semantics for automated service invocation; Semantic Service Description frameworks; information resources, geospatial data, metadata, web services and involvement in standards development.
Academic groups with an interest in coastal marine environments are wide-ranging and include: Coastal Planning, Oceanography, Biology/Ecology, Fisheries, Maritime and Intermodal Transport, Geology and Archaeology.
Intelligent web applications have great potential to collect information from many different sources, combine information, and present it to researchers in a meaningful way. However, this requires semantic description on those resources: books, data, articles, pictures, sound etc. For the semantics to be useful, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning. Ideally, computers must have ways to establish common meanings for whatever resources they encounter.
This is provided by collections of information called ontologies; the most typical kind of ontology for the Web comprises a taxonomy (classes of objects and relations among them) and a set of inference rules.
The COMPASS project, funded under the Knowledge Organisation and Semantic Services strand of the JISC Capital Programme, will be starting in December and will run through to March 2009.