ST Notes 2016

Meeting Notes

October 25, 2016

• ESIP Budget Approval
  • The ESIP Finance Committee has approved all of the items requested in this year's budget. Our theme is outreach and collaboration. ESIP has approved external outreach by approving travel to RDA and the EarthCube All Hands meeting. We have also been approved to host a one day GeoSemantics Symposium the day before the Winter Meeting starts. The goal of the symposium is to bring together ESIP clusters and committees, along with external groups, and begin discussing collaborations and road mapping to maximize reuse and avoid duplication of efforts. Logistics for the symposium are just beginning. The agenda will begin to take shape over the next few weeks. Those with suggestions on topics or format are encouraged to reach out to Tom and Beth.
• ESIP Winter Meeting Session Proposals
  • Session proposals are due October 31. Two topics emerged on the call. The ToolMatch group will host a hands-on session to map datasets and tools. A second idea emerged for a "Semantic Community Engagement Plan" that would cover ontology governance plans, leveraging other communities, finding/identifying/promoting ontologies via the portal. Details on this second session will be worked out in the next few days.
• Ontology Portal Evaluation
  • Annie provided an updated on the portal evaluations. Use cases have been identified to use in the evaluation. Reviewers have also been identified; however, the reviewers have not yet committed to the reviews. Annie will be out starting mid-November on maternity leave. The group all agreed we should not try to rush and start the review process before Annie leaves. Ontology portal evaluations will be put on hold and will resume around March 2017.
• Semantic Roadmap
  • Bhaskar provided an update on the roadmap efforts. He will circulate the latest version of the Google Doc and the group will work to identify writers for each section. Ruth suggested a distributed approach in which writers get only a paragraph or two to write and it becomes a distributed writing effort. We'll review at the November call who has shown interest in contributing
• Collaboration Area Poster
  • ESIP has requested one poster from each cluster and committee to be displayed at the Winter Meeting. These posters will be up throughout the entire ESIP meeting not just at the poster session. Beth had created a similar poster last year to highlight our committee. She will make that poster available and we can collaboratively edit it.

September 27, 2016

• Ontology Portal Evaluation
  • Erin provided an overview of how ESIP was providing evaluations for NASA projects and was expanding into a more general framework for software and project evaluations. This new evaluation framework will be used to provide an independent evaluation of our two ontology portals. The evaluations will try to cover a number of facets including cost, maintenance and support options, functionality, and science use case evaluation
  • Annie continued the discussion with a call for use cases, which will be supplied to the evaluation committee. Beth, Lewis, and others have already contributed several use cases to a github repository at https://esipfed.github.io/stc/UseCases/STCUseCasesAndRequirements.html. Everyone is asked to review the use cases for detail and clarity. Ensure that the actors and workflow are clear and unambiguous. For example, is it clear who the "user" is (developer, domain scientist, etc.)?
  • Beth and Mike Huhns volunteered to review the use cases. Others are encourage to do so as well. All feedback needs to be sent to Annie B. by October 12 so that the evaluation can can begin
• Road Map
  • Bhaskar gave an overview of his objectives for a Semantic Web Roadmap
  • He suggests something that is more fundamental than the EarthCube roadmap from a few years ago
  • For example, what is the basic value proposition of the Semantic Web? How and where can it add value to Earth Sciences
  • A preliminary outline was sent around to the committee via email. Bhaskhar is currently evaluating existing efforts in this area and will soon (next week) produce a shared google doc for collaborative editing on the sections of the roadmap
  • Ruth suggested that we identify folks who can dig into repositories and data centers to really get at the value proposition
  • Several open access outlets are being considered for the final publication. A draft is anticipated by the Winter 2017 ESIP meeting
• RDA Collaboration
  • Soren presented a possible RDA collaboration involving ontology governance
  • RDA VSIG is seeking exemplars of open source governance models. It was suggested that the SWEET model could be put forward as an ESIP exemplar.
  • Ruth volunteered to also present her work on the sea ice ontologies and their model
  • It was suggested that Ruth, Lewis, and anyone else interested, form a temporary subgroup to document and discuss the existing models and prepare a submission to RDA. Ruth will be traveling for the next few weeks and Lewis was not at this call. We will reach out to Lewis and continue the discussion offline once Ruth returns.
• Announcements
  • Ruth mentioned that Purls are becoming available again via Internet archive. Good news for existing ontologies that use Purl URIs

May 24, 2016

• ESIP Ontology Portal Evaluation
  • The summer meeting will be used to gather feedback from the broader ESIP community on which features and functionality are needed in a portal
  • The Business and Planning session at the summer meeting will be used to further discuss our plans for what the evaluation will look like
  • There was a lot of discussion on the two current portals, their functionality, how they handle versioning, and how they handle URIs
  • John proposed a URI scheme for his portal: http://esipsw.org/ont/<authority>/<ontname>/<termID>
    • there was some concern about the new domain
    • John and Tom will work with Erin to see what our options are for using http://esipfed.org
• Business and Planning session at the summer meeting
  • current agenda includes an open discussion on an open source SWEET and what that would entail and continued discussion on the ontology portal evaluation
  • any additional agenda items should be sent to Tom
• Cloud Access
  • We have been offered access to EarthCube's cloud infrastructure for testing of semantic applications
  • It was determined that this may be premature for our group. The ontology portal already has an AWS instance and other applications are not yet ready for this type of deployment. The group would also like to wait to see the outcomes of upcoming EarthCube meetings to see how this cloud infrastructure will fit into the technology architecture and long term vision of EarthCube

March 22, 2016

• Discussion on sessions for the summer meeting. Session proposals are due April 1.
  • We currently have 3 session ideas on the table. 1.) a general Semantic Technologies business and planning session - possibly to include a ToolMatch component, 2.) a tutorial on Linked Data, creating a scheme, publishing and consuming semantic content, and 3.) a tutorial/discussion on what ontologies are currently available, how to find them, and what can I do with them once found
  • There is also a related session being put together by Soren Scott regarding software readiness levels and governance. The topics will be relevant to our committee as we begin to deploy cloud resources to host semantic projects
• Phil Yang and Emily Law are beginning an initial study on costs and design of cloud resources to host semantic applications ESIP-wide
• We are collecting ideas for an ontology portal evaluation
• We identified the following liaisons to external groups. These will be added to the main wiki page in the near future. The intent here is that these individuals are already active participants in external semantic-related groups. Liaisons volunteer to periodically report back to this committee on relevant developments and potential collaboration areas. If applicable, liaisons may help engage their groups on behalf of ESIP. The current approach for reporting is to allot 10 minutes at each future telecon for reporting out by liaisons. If more time is needed then liaisons should contact the chair prior to the call
  • Ruth Duerr - EarthCube Semantics Working Group
  • Brandon Whitehead - Open Geospatial Consortium and RDA - particular focus on GeoSciML, ESD WG and HydroWG, RDA Provenance Group
  • Soren Scott - RDA Provenance WG
  • Stephen Richard - RDA Vocab Services, Terminology IG, and DataType Registry WG
  • Stace Beaulieu - USGS CDI Semantic Web Working Group
  • Adam Shepherd - The Ontolog Community
  • Lewis McGibbney - W3C+OGC Spatial Data on the Web (SDW)
  • Bhaskar Ramachandran - The International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA), http://www.iaoa.org/
  • Pascal Hitzler - Ontology Design & Patterns Association

January 27, 2016

Discussion continued on the transition from Cluster to Committee. The main focus of the call was on what the structure of the Committee and its short term objectives should be.

• Tom and Beth would like the Committee to commit to an AWS server for the long-term hosting of ESIP semantic resources (such as the ontology portal, ESIP Linked Data, and possibly projects that complete the Testbed and need a permanent or semi-permanent home)
  • The process for what does and does not get deployed on this server is still an open question
  • Discussions have begun with ESIP Ex Com and other Clusters/Committees to think about reusing Technology Readiness Levels, software reuse policies, and cloud computing expertise
  • Security will certainly be an issue - this is noted, but no real policy/procedure at the moment
  • Cost was also discussed - we will touch base with Cloud Computing Cluster and others with experience to get a better sense of exact resources needed and proper configuration
  • In general, everyone thought this was something the Committee should commit to, but discussion needs to continue on above issues

• What are other areas the Committee should commit its resources to?
  • It was suggested (Nancy) that Hackathons could be an ideal way to engage others in ESIP - hands-on themed hacking where we address a current ESIP problem or limitation
  • Semantic themed events are a possibility. For example, extra drink tickets at an ESIP meeting for participating in semantic demo session or best use of semantic technologies
  • Engagement with external semantic groups is needed - a google doc is being generated to list high-priority groups and look for existing ESIP members who may volunteer to be liaisons to these groups
    • The google doc is available for editing here

• Budget is currently under development and will soon be submitted to ESIP
  • current items include AWS server, student fellows, travel (to be spread amongst committee members as needed)
  • any other thoughts/ideas please share

• Topic for next call (February 23) is ontology governance. There are some notes and some thoughts on one possible implementation here. Please review and bring ideas/comments to the next call