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IUGG XXIV General Assembly July 2-13, 2007 Perugia, Italy
(S) - IASPEI - International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's
Interior
JSS002 Oral Presentation 1763
Solving the Semantics Problem
Dr. Luis Bermudez
Research and Development Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Adopting metadata specifications is not sufficient to achieve interoperability due to the heterogeneity of
the values in metadata annotations. For example, stage, gage height and water elevation are different
representations of the same concept. These values may be used as values for a metadata element. If
the semantic heterogeneities are not solved among these elements then they will appear to be referring
to different phenomena. Therefore, searching for stage data will not retrieve all the possible results. The
Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project is working to address this issue, as well as other
semantic conflicts. The work is guided by community collaborations and supported via the MMI site
(http://marinemetadata.org). The main activities that MMI focuses to achieve semantic interoperability
are: 1) encouraging the use of already existing vocabularies; 2) providing best practices about
publishing controlled vocabularies so that they are interoperable in the Semantic Web; 3) hosting
workshops to create and map controlled vocabularies; 4) providing tools and guidance to solve semantic
heterogeneities.
Keywords: semantic web, ontologies, interoperability