An Ontology Service for Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD)

An Ontology encodes concepts and the relationships among them. From a machine learning perspective, it is viewed as a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) is a large NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative to provide scalable, integrated gird framework for use in accessing, preparing, assimilating, predicting, analyzing and managing a broad array of meteorological and related information independent of format and physical location. An ontology that focuses on mesoscale meteorology is currently being designed and developed for LEAD. It uses the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology - ontology (SWEET, Rob Raskin - JPL) as a building block and additional concepts for mesoscale meteorology are being added. An Ontology Inference Service (OIS) is also developed to provide querying capabilities on the LEAD Ontology. The drivers for developing such an ontology and inference service specifically for LEAD are many. The LEAD ontology serves as a common vocabulary to allow interoperability for metadata exchange between different LEAD catalogs. Coupled with these LEAD catalogs, the OIS will also provide a 'yellow pages' search capability to the end users. The OIS provides capabilities to search for similar and related concepts for a particular concept. This is essentially, searching with semantic meanings rather than searching with keywords. Thus allowing users to search for datasets without actually having to know and use the specific data parameter names in the catalogs. Finally, the OIS serves as a stand-alone smart search system for the atmospheric domain, specifically mesoscale meteorology. This smart search service collates the definition of a user's search term, useful datasets, related concepts, useful websites and additional related information. It serves as an educational portal for both students and researchers in LEAD.