Semantic Specification of Data Type Information in the Deep Carbon Observatory Data Portal

Abstract:

The global open data initiative is incubating a social-technical system that promotes both the culture and the practice of open data. Within such a system, data are going to be shared and reused across various boundaries, both physically and conceptually. Among the various metadata elements available for describing the shared data, data type information can provide clues for both users and machines on how to parse and use the data. Data types are often treated only as syntax of variables, such as integer, float, Boolean, character, and string, etc. Such declaration does not offer any domain specific meaning to the data types. Our intention is to let a data type include more meanings, such as who create the data type, the source standard that the data type derives from, the operations that can be done on datasets of that data type, and typical scientific domains, software programs and/or instruments that use the data type. We deployed semantic technologies to address this issue, and initial results have already been achieved in the Deep Carbon Observatory Data Portal.