On Aug 31, 1:49 am, "Michael Tobis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I got this in an IEEE newsletter and found it interesting: > > === > Earth Observation Group Nears Agreement on How to Proceed > How do you get thousands of Earth-observation systems that were built at > different times by different people for diverse purposes and that use > dissimilar data formats and communications techniques to operate > smoothly together and form a coherent system? Get the answer > athttp://bmsmail3.ieee.org:80/u/6923/04280822 > === > > Does anyone know of a comparable effort for earth based earth science > observations? Yes, I participate in one called Data Integration and Analysis System, but the web site of the project http://www.diasjp.org is currently in Japanese only. Some materials in English were presented at Asian Water Cycle symposium in January: http://www.prime-intl.co.jp/awcs07/presentationmaterials.php In particular, see R. Shibasaki's presentation on "Interoperability arrangements". (Warning: That PDF file contains many character sets besides ASCII, just to illustrate that there are many languages.) If we start a new database from scratch, we can standardize terminology. But more often, terminologies of operational agencies and/ or scientific disciplines can not be changed. Therefore, Shibasaki puts emphasis on helping users to correctly interpret technical terms of different disciplines by something like a huge intelligent lexicon. As an expert of geographical information science, he calls the technology "ontology". (I do not want to use this philosophical word this way myself. I prefer "lexicon" which was a word used by Thomas Kuhn in philosophical essays in his later years.) I do not expect that such technology will give us very accurate and reliable automatic interface. I think that we will always need those people who understand jargon of multiple communities. But I think that such technology is useful in the sense that it will make looking up many dictionaries much more conveniently than we do today. For Asian Water Cycle Initiative, we want to standardize the terms within its database, but the people who are going to provide information may have different terminology. Concerning specification of quantitative observations of physical variables, the diversity is not excessively large, and we hope that we can get correct input if the user interface gives enough hints. But to prepare a detailed tree- like list of possible observations is a hard task and it cannot be complete from the beginning. We need trial and error. We are going to have another meeting of this "initiative" next week. I will report if we have some progress. Ko-1 M. (Kooiti Masuda) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
