19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Plenary - Mark-Up Languages

The Semantic Web and Science Data Exchange

Brian Matthews
CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK

The Semantic Web initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been creating interest for some time and is now reaching a stable state where serious applications are beginning to appear. By allowing the sharing of meaningful machine readable information, it potentially could allow the sharing of common vocabulary, and the exchange and use of meatadata and data from different sources.

For example, the management of the marine environment is restricted by the lack of interoperability between the diversity of data formats, proprietary data management systems, numerical models, and visualisation tools. Different studies, instruments, programs, and data centres collect, process, analyse and archive data on the marine environment in such different ways that exchanging and comparing information between them to build a unified picture of the world's seas and oceans becomes a difficult task. This is an area where exploiting the power of the Semantic Web could be of great help.

The aim of EU Marine XML project (http://www.marinexml.net/) is to demonstrate that the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) technology from the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can be used to improve data interoperability for the marine community, and specifically in support of marine observation systems, whilst not rendering investment in existing systems obsolete. The Marine XML Project will not result in the creation of a full MML specification but the project is addressing the underlying framework issues of interoperability between existing and emerging standards. Tools and techniques from the Semantic Web are being used to provide this framework.

In this talk, I will briefly discuss the aims and approach of the Semantic Web, and then go on to discuss how it is being used to support science data exchange with examples from the Marine XML project.