IN23D-1752
Crosswalking near-Earth and space physics ontologies in SPASE and ESPAS
Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Ivan A Galkin1, Shing F Fung2, Robert F Benson2, Daniel Heynderickx3, Bernd Ritschel4, Todd A King5, D Aaron Roberts6, Michael A Hapgood7 and Anna Belehaki8, (1)Univ Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, United States, (2)NASA Goddard SFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)DH Consultancy, Leuven, Belgium, (4)Helmholtz Centre Potsdam GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany, (5)University of California Los Angeles, EPSS, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (6)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 672, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (7)Science and Technology Facilities Council, Didcot, OX11, United Kingdom, (8)National Observatory of Athens, IAASARS, Athens, Greece
Abstract:
In order to support scientific discoveries in Heliophysics (HP), with modern data systems, the HP Data Centers actively pursue harmonization of available metadata that allows crossing boundaries between existing data models, conventions, and resource interfaces. The discoverability of HP observations is improved when associated metadata describes their physical content in agreed terms as a part of the resource registration. One of the great challenges of enabling such content-targeted data search capability is the harmonization of domain ontology across data providers. Ontologies are the cornerstones of the content-aware data systems: they define an agreed vocabulary of keywords that capture the essence of domain-specific concepts and their relationships. With the introduction of the Virtual Wave Observatory (VWO), as part of NASA’s Virtual System Observatory in 2008, the task of formulating the HP ontology became yet more complicated. Definitions of the wave domain concepts required several layers of specifications that described the generation, propagation, and interaction of the waves with the underlying medium in addition to the observation itself. Simple keyword lists could not provide a sufficiently information-rich description, given the complexity of the wave domain, and the development of a more powerful schema was required. The ontology research at the VWO eventually resulted in a suitable multi-hierarchical design that found its first implementation in 2015 at one of the European space physics data repositories, the near-Earth Space Data Infrastructure for e-Science (ESPAS). Similar to many other European geoscience projects, ESPAS is based on the ISO 19156 Observation and Measurements standard. In cooperation with the NASA VWO, the ESPAS project has deployed a space physics ontology design for all data registration purposes. The VWO science team is now uniquely positioned to establish a crosswalk between the ESPAS ontology based on ISO 19156 and the VWO ontology based on the SPASE data model. The crosswalk both maps the individual vocabulary terms and accommodates the underlying differences in the structural model elements that are part of both standards. We will review practical questions of harmonizing SPASE and ISO solutions specific to the HP domain ontology.
