Background and Motivation

The ESIP Community Ontology Repository started life as part of the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project's web services. MMI created an Ontology Registry and Repository—ORR—to let members of the marine and earth science communities easily create and store simple semantic content (vocabularies) in a way that combined with the semantic web.

The ESIP Federation saw an opportunity to re-purpose the ORR software as a learning and evaluation tool for the ESIP community. By deploying the ORR as an ESIP-focused service, it would be available to a wide earth science community, and could provide different services that could be considered alongside the existing ESIP Semantic Repository. The ORR team installed a version of their software as the Community Ontology Repository, allowing ESIP users to test it against their own requirements and scenarios.

After performing this testing in comparison with another semantic portal, ESIP designated the Community Ontology Repository as its supported system to connect the earth science community with semantic capabilities. This COR service is offered as a production resource for the earth science community, and can also be used as a testing and training tool for use by ESIP members. At each ESIP bi-annual meeting, the ESIP community members can obtain training in the features of the COR, and for those with detailed technical interest, techniques to maintain the COR and contribution to it.

The rest of this documentation presents the capabilities of the ESIP Community Ontology Repository.