Semantic Tools for Data Management (Semtools)

The Semantic Tools for Data Management (Semtools) project is tackling critical issues in the management and use of heterogeneous scientific data.  Existing approaches to managing data and associated metadata fail to adequately capture the semantics of the scientific process, thereby impeding the utility of those data for important scientific issues.  In Semtools, we will provide new capabilities for data access, discovery, integration, and visualization by developing software tools that utilize semantically annotated data and metadata.

Four primary objectives will be addressed in this project that build upon our prior work in KNB and SEEK:

1. Contribute to the Semantic Observations Network (SONet) to develop and ratify a community-driven core ontology for representing observational data.
2. Revise and extend the structure of EML so that it is capable of storing semantic annotations that reference the core observation ontology
   
3. Demonstrate new semantic data management capabilities by extending existing software already in use by the ecological community: the EML storage system, Metacat, to provide annotation storage and ontology reasoning services; and the metadata editor, Morpho, for semantic annotation and a range of semantically enhanced services (e.g., searching, summarizing, visualization, etc.).
4. Engage the community through workshops to solicit use cases to drive research and development, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the semantic extensions to Morpho, Metacat, and EML.