COMPASS
Title
Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship
Acronym
COMPASS
Duration
December 2007 - 30 June 2009
Website
Summary
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.
By assigning semantic information to descriptions of books, data, articles, pictures, sound, intelligent web applications can collect and combine information from many different sources, and present it to researchers in a way that is more meaningful than the same information in its original scattered form. However, two resources may use different labels to describe what is in fact the same concept, such as ‘coastline’.
To compare or combine information from two resources, computers have to know that these two terms are being used to mean the same thing. This knowledge 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 (rules that compare one descriptive term to another).
Through a series of coordinated work packages, COMPASS plans to demonstrate the benefits of developing an "ontologically-driven" infrastructure within the marine domain to address issues of discovery, access and use of scientific resources (data, specifically geospatial data, but also citations, journals, metadata).
The project brings together a group with 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.
Project Deliverables
- A web-based demonstrator for scientists to discover access and execute resources related to coastal and marine domains
- A technical design for a knowledge infrastructure to drive the demonstrator
- A domain ontology or set of ontologies for the coastal domain
- A scientific resource ontology to describe knowledge stored in the infrastructure
- A set of semantically annotated resources
- A set of reports synthesising lessons learnt during the project including; architecture; integration of digital libraries, use of informal user tags v. ontologies; ontology engineering tools review.
EDINA Contact
Funders
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Digital Enterprise Research Institute
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