Abstract
To use data proficiently and efficiently, scientists require comprehensive metadata. This is very difficult to reconstruct conceptually, positionally and temporally far from the time and place of data acquisition. The European Commission funded Eurofleets project, whose mission is to build an integrated European oceanographic research vessel fleet, is developing a system that aims to address this issue by capturing metadata in a uniform way at time of observation. As this is a European-wide initiative, the problems associated with the desired level of integration are also broad. Having so many partners, different paradigms, schools, practices and vocabularies must be taken into consideration. Assuming that this divergence is natural and even somehow positive in the perspective of adapting to a changing environment, we detail how bridging can take place using a systemic approach. In the Eurofleets experience, this relied on the definition of a boundary object: that is an artifact that can be used by each of the diverging communities, since it embeds the core, shared conceptual entities. The structure of the boundary object is based on an event model, its ontology and the controlled vocabularies linked to it. All conceptual entities, and indeed the structure of the boundary object itself, resulted from wide discussions among the divergent communities. These discussions, allowed the extension of meaning from a semantic perspective to the pragmatic scope, where theoretical and cultural matters can also be considered, so that, eventually, the knowledge represented by the boundary object is more likely to be understood across the divergent communities. To exploit the possibilities offered by the boundary object, specific software has been developed that, using the event model and ontology, allows easier deployment across the project partners of a system intended to address the heterogeneity of the research vessel fleet. In this paper we describe in detail the underlying ontology.
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Notes
Such problems have been studied deeply by scholars. We will only report here on an interesting case mentioned by the french anthropologist Marc Augé (1986) comparing the English term “train connection” with what used in France (“correspondance”) and in Italy (“coincidenza”). Although they all are perfectly and equally logical and meaningful, although trains in Italy score among the best in being on time, nevertheless, the different words can be understood as projecting different connotations. (For a reference on the difference between connotation and denotation see Diviacco 2012).
NMEA datagrams are basic data communication units carrying information between marine electronic devices such as GPS or echo sounders following the National Marine Electronics Association standard (NMEA)
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the European Commission as part of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), EUROFLEETS. The authors are grateful to all the project partners for taking part into the discussions that grounded the EARS system development.
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Communicated by: H. A. Babaie
Published in the Special Issue “Semantic e-Sciences” with Guest Editors Dr. Xiaogang Ma, Dr. Peter Fox, Dr. Thomas Narock and Dr. Brian Wilson
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Diviacco, P., De Cauwer, K., Leadbetter, A. et al. Bridging semantically different paradigms in the field of marine acquisition event logging. Earth Sci Inform 8, 135–146 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-014-0192-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-014-0192-0