Integrating Scientific Data through External, Concept-Based Annotations

Abstract

In several scientific application domains, such as the computational sciences, the transparent and integrated access to distributed and heterogeneous data sources is key to leveraging the knowledge and findings of researchers. Standard database integration approaches, however, are either not applicable or insufficient because of lack of local and global schema structures. In these application domains, data integration often occurs manually in that researchers collect data and categorize them using "semantic indexing", in the most simple case through local bookmarking, which leaves them without appropriate data query, sharing, and management mechanisms.In this paper, we present a data integration technique suitable for such application domains. This technique is based on the notion of controlled data annotations, resembling the idea of associating semantic rich metadata with diverse types of data, including images and text-based documents. Using concept like structures defined by scientists, data annotations allows scientists to link such Web-accessible data at different levels of granularity to concepts. Annotated data describing instances of such concepts then provides for sophisticated query schemes that researchers can employ to query the distributed data in an integrated and transparent fashion. We present our data annotation framework in the context of the Neurosciences where researchers employ concepts and annotations to integrate and query diverse types of data managed and distributed among individual research groups.

Semantic Technologies for Describing Measurement Data in Databases

“…But that is the focus of the presented paper, to concentrate on the content level of exchanged data. For that reason micro-annotations are utilized in a similar way as they are used with web pages [9] or multimedia files [11]. The aspect of data flow and its composition has only a minor role.…”

“…4). The just presented approach is the adaption of commonly discussed multimedia annotations [9,11] for measurement data. The term micro-annotations is also adapted from this domain.…”

Mesotext : Digitised Emblems, Modelled Annotations and Humanities Scholarship

“…The analysis was based on literature about existing annotation tools5 7 F 58 and discussions of how annotation could help in 58 Among other literature Gertz & Sattler (2003) and Bird & Liberman (2001). researching the books that EDITOR's designers were working on at the time. General requirements are: 1.…”

Graphitti: An Annotation Management System for Heterogeneous Objects

“…In recent times, the emerging importance of annotation in scientific data management has been recognized by the Information Management community, leading to a variety of research in annotation management such as [5], [2], [6], [3], [8]. However, these efforts mostly center around more traditional forms of data like relational tables and XML documents.…”