[OWW-Discuss] Talk on semantic e-science at Harvard, Wed January 31, 4pm

[Antoon Goderis]

http://iic.harvard.edu/event12.php

Antoon
http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:AntoonGoderis
--

Sense and Sensibility: Adding meaning to metadata for manageable
middleware

Prof. Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK

Abstract

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a grid application in
possession of good middleware, must be in want of meaningful metadata.

We have seen a variety of projects and programmes of activity thathave
promoted systematic approaches to describing, linking and sharing
metadata, particularly through the use of community-wide terminologies or
ontologies. Life Sciences have led the way. The founding of the USA.s
National Centre for BioMedical Ontology (http://www.bioontology.org) is an
example. The Semantic Web has given distributed information management a
technical impetus, and once again the Life Sciences are pioneers.
Meanwhile, the Semantic Grid initiative attempts to marry the two
technical efforts of Grid Middleware and Web-wide Information Management
to generally support better metadata (and data) management for Science
applications and the infrastructure that underpins them. Again, early
examples such as myGrid are found in the Life Sciences. Recent work on a
Semantic Open Grid Service Architecture (S-OGSA) lays the foundation for a
systematic yet lightweight approach to deploying semantics into new and
legacy Grid middleware.

In this talk I will share my experiences of applying Semantic Web and
ontology based approaches to represent and classify metadata and discuss
the Semantic Grid using the S-OGSA as an illustration. I.ll also take the
opportunity to voice some concerns and raise some challenges that we have
to overcome, not many of which are technical.