Subject: Suggestion for a Semantic Map convention
Eliot Christian (echristi@usgs.gov)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 08:25:45 -0500
Message-Id: <199811231337.IAA16801@igsrsparc4.er.usgs.GOV> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 08:25:45 -0500 To: gils@cni.org From: Eliot Christian <echristi@usgs.gov> Subject: Suggestion for a Semantic Map convention
One of the key barriers to search interoperability is the
lack of a common convention for communicating about semantics.
Since there already exist many "registries" of semantics for
metadata elements, it seems to me it would be useful to have a
way for providers and intermediaries to express what elements
they consider to be semantically equivalent. In fact, such a
convention is of immediate interest for the ASF Architecture.
I would like to suggest a fairly simple cross-walk mechanism
that uses XML as its syntax. I have posted an example of how
this might work: <http://www.gils.net/elements/semantic-map.xml> .
In this example there are 100 "semantic units" corresponding to
common metadata elements, plus a few abstract classes from which
they stem. Each unit can have multiple contexts, typically
associated with some standardization effort by a community of
interest. Some contexts I include in the example are: MARC,
ISO 11179, ISO 23950, ISO 10546-15, and HTML-Meta (Dublin Core).
For each context, attributes are available for things like tags,
definitions, data-types, occurrences, concept-class, etc.
I am most interested to hear any comments on this suggestion.
Eliot Christian, US Geological Survey, 802 National Center, Reston VA 20192
echristi@usgs.gov Office 703-648-7245 FAX 703-648-7112 Home 703-476-6134
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