Semantic middleware for e‐Science knowledge spaces

Abstract

The Tupelo semantic content management middleware implements Knowledge Spaces that enable scientists to integrate information into a comprehensive research record as they work with existing tools and domainspecific applications. Knowledge Spaces combine approaches that have demonstrated success in automating parts of this integration activity, including content management systems for domain-neutral management of data, workflow technologies for management of computation and analysis, and semantic web technologies for extensible, portable, citable management of descriptive information and other metadata. Tupelo's 'Context' facility and its associated semantic operations both allow existing data representations and tools to be plugged in, and also provide a semantic 'glue' of important associative relationships that span the research record, such as provenance, social networks, and annotation. Tupelo has enabled the recent work creating e-Science cyberenvironments to serve distributed, active scientific communities, allowing researchers to develop, coordinate and share datasets, documents, and computational models, while preserving process documentation and other contextual information needed to produce an integrated research record suitable for distribution and archiving. J. FUTRELLE ET AL.information and knowledge management. Knowledge Spaces include data management capabilities based on the domain-neutral approaches developed in digital libraries and content management systems (CMS), which helps address the problem of having generalized data management functions implemented in many incompatible ways in specialized scientific tools. Knowledge Spaces also include workflow provenance, so that scientists can keep track of associations between data products and the analysis process that produced them without having to manually create and manage those associations. And finally, Knowledge Spaces use semantic web technologies to provide 'schema-less' metadata management with global identification, so that Knowledge Spaces' integrative facilities (e.g. organizing, tagging, linking, annotating, following chains of derivation) can be extended to distributed systems and new domains without having to develop new database schemas or document types, along with code to interpret them.By implementing Knowledge Spaces in the Tupelo middleware framework, we have been able to develop a suite of interoperable, context-aware tools, including the CyberIntegrator provenanceaware exploratory workflow tool, the CyberCollaboratory web-based collaboration tool, the Digital Synthesis Framework [4] for publishing interactive datasets, and the Medici multimedia environment [5]. These tools have been deployed to create Knowledge Spaces supporting environmental and other sciences, science education, and digital humanities, as well as providing provenance support for a growing collection of workflow projects in collaboration with the Provenance Challenge workshop series [6,7], which has brought together developers of workflow systems, such as Kep...

DSont: DSpace to ontology transformation

“…Internet technologies have enabled academics to connect and collaborate by sharing their research online. An ontology can facilitate the effective sharing and reuse of existing information and can create an integrated view of multidisciplinary information [1–5]. It represents a data source at a higher level of abstraction and manifests the semantics of a source [6].…”