Achieving Semantic Interoperability through Controlled Annotations

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Achieving Semantic Interoperability through
Controlled Annotations

• Michael Gertz
• Department of Computer Science
• University of California, Davis
• gertz_at_cs.ucdavis.edu

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Interoperability The Facts

• There is a high degree of physical connectivity
  on the Web, i.e., in terms of exchanging bits and
  bytes among heterogeneous information sources.
• There is a lack of logical connectivity, i.e.,
  the meaningful exchange, integration, and
  querying of data.
• Metadata are supposed to help adding more
  semantics to data, but are not frequently used.
• What are appropriate metadata schemes that help
  users and creators of Digital Libraries to create
  and utilize metadata?

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The Idea

• Build domain specific ontologies (richer than
  standard vocabularies) ontologies contain
  concepts, terms, definitions, and semantic
  relationships among concepts.
• Allow users to associate concepts from ontology
  with data found on Web pages and sites, at
  different levels of granularity.
• Such associations are called annotations,
  providing meaningful and well-defined metadata.
• Relationships modeled in ontology are inherited
  to annotated Web data (?semantic browsing)

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An Example

• Collection of Monkey Brain Images

terms
properties
relationships
spatial
temporal
semantic
Data as on the Web
Ontology
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The Architecture

HTTP
HTTP
HTTP
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The Major Questions

• Are users and creators of Digital Libraries
  willing to develop ontologies and use them to
  annotate data?
• How difficult is it to develop cross-language
  ontologies?
• What are necessary and useful components of a
  respective infrastructure? Does XML provide a
  basis?
• What types of annotations do users want to make?
• What are behavior models users employ to make and
  use annotations?
• Do annotations lead to the so-called semantic
  Web?