| Abstract
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Needs continue to grow for access to distr … Needs continue to grow for access to distributed, disparate collections of online data products and data services. Broad discipline-specific areas of informatics are emerging to address these needs, including Geoinformatics. A relatively recent trend in Geoinformatics and the geosciences is single
discipline and interdisciplinary virtual observatories. Virtual observatories provide access to distributed collections of observational data and related services.
Virtual observatories, in their mature form, have many challenges. They must provide access to data from a wide range of observatories, collected by many different investigators using multiple instruments, sometimes with different settings, in different experimental settings which may have implicit assumptions embedded within. Data sets may take many forms using different languages and conventions. Further, data processing operations may have been performed on the data sets for cleansing or conformity, and if so, this
information needs to be maintained. Analysis programs may also be available as services and these services may have varying input and output requirements. In this talk, we will leverage our experience with semantic technologies and knowledge representation to discuss how a relatively small amount of semantics
can be used to address virtual observatory challenges. We will provide examples from our use of semantics in our Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) project and highlight some of the benefits of semantics in Geoscience settings. efits of semantics in Geoscience settings.
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