Ecoterm

Action Points for the Following Year

The following points are based on a presentation by Alistair Miles at the 2005 Berlin Ecoinformatics meeting.

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Steps toward interoperability

URI's

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1. Use URIs
2. Use URIs well (consistency, persistence, articulated management & maintenance policies etc.)
3. Be clear about what a URI identifies
   • Concepts? Classes? Something else?
4. Publish RDF descriptions of the things you are identifying
5. Use ‘well-established’ RDF vocabularies as far as possible, extend as appropriate
6. make commitments to maintaining RDF descriptions, and publish maintenance policies and procedures

Establish a semantic web of terminological / conceptual / ontological data relating to the environment

Hsolbrig N.B. Mayo Position Paper on LSID's describes how URI's are described in HL7 and elsewhere
Hsolbrig N.B. The Life Sciences Identifier (LSID) and the [[1] LSID Project] are different, but related.

Services

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• With a web of data in place, the role of services becomes extremely clear: to provide efficient, convenient, programmatic Interaction with subsets of that web of data.
• Build a service-oriented architecture on top of a web of data

• Steps to achieving this:

1. Analyse and publish functional requirements for service types (I.e. what do I want a service to do?)
2. Study functional requirements within this community, identify and publish sets of common requirements (basis for standardisation work)
3. Take a look at SPARQL services & protocol (v. cheap)

• • N.B. true standardisation of a service interface requires a (lightweight, informal, open) community-driven process for developing a web-service specification and building consensus