Reactive Leadership: Divining, Developing, and Demonstrating Community Ontologies

The Marine Metadata Interoperability Project (known as MMI, on the web at http://marinemetadata.org) was formed to provide leadership in metadata practices to the marine science community. In 2004 this meant finding and writing about resources and best practices, which until then were all but invisible. In 2008 the scope is far wider, encompassing comprehensive guidance, collaborative community environments, and introduction and demonstration of advanced technologies to an increasingly interested scientific domain. MMI's technical leadership, based on experiences gained in the hydrologic community, emphasized the role ontologies could play in marine science. An early MMI workshop successfully incorporated a large number of community vocabularies, tools to harmonize them in a common ontological format, and the mapping of terms from vocabularies expressed in that format. That 2005 workshop demonstrated the connections to be made among different community vocabularies, and was well regarded by participants, but did not lead to widespread adoption of the tools, technologies, or even the vocabularies. Ontology development efforts for marine sensors and platforms showed intermittent progress, but again were not adopted or pushed toward completion. It is now 2008, and the marine community is increasingly attentive to a wide range of interoperability issues. A large part of the community has at least heard of "semantic interoperability", and many understand its critical role in finding and working with data. Demand for specific solutions, and for workable approaches, is becoming more vocal in the marine community. Yet there is still no encompassing model in place for achieving semantic interoperability, only simple operational registries have been set up for oceanographic community vocabularies, and only a few isolated applications demonstrate how semantic barriers can be overcome. Why has progress been so slow? Are good answers on the horizon? And if we build it, will the community come to use a semantic framework based on ontologies? This presentation will review 5 years of building community semantic interoperability. We'll examine this community's adoption and application of ontologies, how well that has worked so far (and why), and where (and how far) marine ontologies might go from here.