Controlled Vocabularies, Mini Ontologies and Interoperability (Invited)
Abstract
Interoperability has been an elusive goal, but in recent years advances have been made using controlled vocabularies, mini-ontologies and a lot of collaboration. This has led to increased interoperability between disciplines in the U.S. and between international projects. We discuss the successful pattern followed by SPASE, IVOA and IPDA to achieve this new level of international interoperability. A key aspect of the pattern is open standards and open participation with interoperability achieved with shared services, public APIs, standard formats and open access to data. Many of these standards are expressed as controlled vocabularies and mini ontologies. To illustrate the pattern we look at SPASE related efforts and participation of North America's Heliophysics Data Environment and CDPP; Europe's Cluster Active Archive, IMPEx, EuroPlanet, ESPAS and HELIO; and Japan's magnetospheric missions. Each participating project has its own life cycle and successful standards development must always take this into account. A major challenge for sustained collaboration and interoperability is the limited lifespan of many of the participating projects. Innovative approaches and new tools and frameworks are often developed as competitively selected, limited term projects, but for sustainable interoperability successful approaches need to become part of a long term infrastructure. This is being encouraged and achieved in many domains and we are entering a golden age of interoperability.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMIN23D1447K
- Keywords:
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- 1934 INFORMATICS International collaboration;
- 1936 INFORMATICS Interoperability;
- 7800 SPACE PLASMA PHYSICS;
- 7900 SPACE WEATHER