[esip-semanticweb] metadata ontology

[Siri Jodha Khalsa]

At the ESIP semantic web cluster meeting on 7/15 in Santa Fe someone 
asked about creating a metadata ontology. Peter said this idea had 
already discussed and dismissed. I mentioned that ISO/TC211 has a new 
project to create an ontology from the TC211 UML models. Peter said that 
encoding a model into an ontology doesn't make it an ontology. I agree, 
but still think that creating an ontology from the concepts represented 
in the TC211 abstract models is a good idea.

I'm wondering whether this group is interested in discussing the topic.

First, some background: ISO/TC211 has developed a suite of standards to 
structure the description and representation of geographic information, 
beginning with a reference model. Spatial and temporal primitives are 
defined to structure the description of geometry, topology and time. A 
methodology to catalog features defines the elements and structure of 
geographic features and their semantics. Concepts describing quality 
measures, access constraints, encodings and other descriptive 
information are represented.

Since the same geographic features may be described differently 
according to the specific context from which they are abstracted there 
is a need to address the semantics issue more rigorously in the ISO19100 
suites of standards. For this reason a new project was initiated, ISO 
19150, with the objective of advancing the geo-semantic web beginning 
with converting, in a yet-to-be-determined fashion, the TC211 UML 
harmonized model into OWL.  Would this group be interested in 
participating in this effort?

sjs

-- 
Siri-Jodha Singh KHALSA, Ph.D., SMIEEE
National Snow and Ice Data Center
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0449 Phone: 1-303-492-1445 GV: 1-303-736-9976
http://cires.colorado.edu/~khalsa