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

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

• Services?

• • 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