[Bessig] BESSIG meeting, Wed, 4/16, 4:15 - 6:00, Outlook

[Anne Wilson]

Hi BESSIG,

Our monthly meeting is next week, when our own LASP students Mik Cox and 
Ty Traver will present

An Easy Bake Semantic Metadata Repository for Scientific Data

Mik Cox, Tyler Traver, Anne Wilson, Doug Lindholm, Laboratory for 
Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), Don Elsborg, CU Faculty Affairs

This presentation will discuss the use of open source tools and the 
tasks that remained to create a semantically enabled metadata repository.

The LASP Interactive Solar Irradiance Data Center, LISIRD, is a web site 
that serves the lab's solar irradiance and related data products to the 
public. LISIRD provides information about the data it offers as part of 
its web page content, embedded in static HTML. At the same time, other 
LASP web sites also provide the same information, such as sites 
pertaining to specific missions or education and outreach.  Keeping data 
set information updated and in sync across web sites is a problem. Nor 
is the information interoperable with emerging search and discovery tools.

To address this and other issues, we created a semantically enabled 
metadata repository that holds information about our data.  In 
conjunction, we prototyped a new implementation of LISIRD that 
dynamically renders page content, pulling metadata from the repository 
and including in the page current, vetted metadata from a single, 
definitive source. Other web pages can similarly pull this information 
if they choose.  Additionally we can now offer new semantic browse and 
search capabilities, such as search of data sets by type (currently 
spectral solar irradiance, total solar irradiance, and solar indices) or 
over a particular spectral range provided by the user.

We can also render the metadata in various formats understandable to 
other communities, such as SPASE for the heliophysics community and ISO 
for the international community. This will allow us to federate with 
sites that use those formats, allowing broader discovery of our data.

To date, metadata management at LASP has generally been done on a per 
project, ad hoc basis. We are building applications on top of the 
repository that provide CRUD (create, read, update, delete) capabilities 
for metadata records to metadata 'owners' and 'curators'. We expect this 
to help data managers to store and manage their metadata in a more 
rigorous fashion should they choose to use it.

We heavily leveraged existing open source tools to create the 
repository. In this talk we'll talk about using VIVO to create a 
semantic database, LaTiS to fetch data and metadata, and AngularJS to 
write dynamic, testable JavaScript.  We'll describe our experiences 
extending two existing ontologies to meet our space physics domain needs.

With these tools and some student time (though our students are 
exceptional) we are achieving significantly increased capabilities at a 
relatively low cost. We believe this tool combination could help 
projects with limited resources achieve similar capabilities to manage 
and provide access to metadata.

And, if that's not easy-bake enough for you, try this PC EZ-Bake Oven, 
made especially for geeks: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/ezbake.shtml.

See 
http://lasp.colorado.edu/galaxy/display/BESSIG/2014/04/09/BESSIG+Meeting+Wed%2C+April+16%2C+4%3A15+-+6%3A00%2C+Outlook 
for complete information.

Come on by!

Anne