INTEROP--Spatial Ontology Community of Practice: an Interdisciplinary Network to Support Geospatial Data Sharing, Integration, and Interoperability

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Award: 0955816PI: Nancy WeigandProject Title: Spatial Ontology Community of Practice: an Interdisciplinary Network to Support Geospatial Data Sharing, Integration and Interoperability (INTEROP)Geospatial data, which describe location information for geographic features, are pervasive across many disciplines and fundamental for diverse applications, such as economic development, natural resources, environmental protection, and emergency response. But, re-using geospatial data remains difficult because of the heterogeneity. Although progress has been made by initiatives such as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and Geospatial One-Stop to distribute data, it is now necessary to address issues of standards harmonization and agreement on the meanings of relevant concepts from diverse data sets due to the use of different community views. Semantic interoperability has been recognized as a stumbling block to collaboration needed by research communities. As a solution, well designed, formal ontologies, relying on agreements between communities on unambiguous representation of concepts and relationships for a given problem area, can be used as an analytic tool to bridge community gaps. Unfortunately, many communities lack the expertise to develop, test, and disseminate such ontologies on their own, and, further, common ontologies require agreement across a range of communities. The purpose of this Network is to create such opportunities for the geospatial community and extend the results to related communities. The Network can be considered as an umbrella over other more specific domains linked through the Network. The Network is based on an existing Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP) network that already has a core group of active participants from academia, government, and industry. Mechanisms for the Network include an on-line collaboration environment, a repository for geospatial ontologies with tools; educational and participatory workshops for a broad geospatial community to solicit input on use cases, smaller working group sessions on one or two chosen domains to collaborate on developing ontologies that work across use cases, and interactions with standards groups for formal publishing of ontologies, demonstrations, and research activities. The SOCoP INTEROP network will also provide training and outreach in cross-area standards, data-sharing, and information management in scientific and local communities by demonstrating the power of cooperative modeling of semantics. An educational component on geospatial ontologies will also be developed. The project will contribute to a model to incorporate semantics into the next phase of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure