The Marine Metadata Interoperability Project:
Semantic Web Services

With the proliferation of vocabularies specific to projects, data repositories, domains, and even individual scientists, finding and using data has become a manual and often labor-intensive task. To facilitate data discovery in the oceanographic realm, MMI has developed tools (VINE and Voc2RDF), provided guides, and hosted mapping sessions and workshops to identify the most important usage and discovery vocabularies and to create crosswalks from other vocabularies to the recommended ones.

In addition, MMI has conceived and begun implementing a semantic framework, to let the Marine science community leverage this library of semantic work. MMI wrote up a description of the semantic framework, which includes both a general overview of the framework's operations, and details about user and software interactions.

To make the ontologies and the mappings available, the ontologies are stored in a data base, indexed and made available using web services. Each term in the ontologies is also made a first-class resource on the web, named with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which can be used to dereference additional metadata about the resource.

Service: MMI Ontology and Repository: http://mmisw.org/or

The MMI Ontology Registry and Repository is a service for submitting and presenting ontologies (vocabularies in a particular format) and their terms.

In the examples below, 'authority' is the named authority for the ontology, 'version' is typically YYYYMMDD and is optional (omitting it provides the most recent version; this is the only available option at this time), and 'topic' is the name or subject of the ontology. For example:

  http://mmisw.org/ont/mmi/sensor and http://mmisw.org/ont/mmi/sensor.html

should access the MMI device ontology and corresponding HTML presentation of it.

  • Introduction/home page: http://mmisw.org/or
  • A specific ontology: http://mmisw.org/ont/{authority}/{version}/{topic}
  • HTML presentation of a specific ontology: http://mmisw.org/ont/{authority}/{version}/{topic}.html
  • A specific term: http://mmisw.org/ont/{authority}/{version}/{topic}/{term}

Other Web Services

Many of the previous demonstration web services at MMI have been deprecated.

Information about deprecated MMI web services my be found at http://marinemetadata.org/community/teams/ont/webservicesdeprecated.