Project Name (4GK)
The Semantic Planetary Data System (SemanticPDS) (4GL)
Summary (4GM)
This project has the primary goal of demonstrating the use of semantic web technologies to provide more powerful, flexible, and intuitive user interfaces for finding data across the heterogeneous, geographically distributed science data archives in the space science community. (4GN)
Using the Planetary Data System (PDS) as a case study, an ontology was developed using the existing semantically rich PDS Catalog. The ontology was exported to RDFs/RDF formatted files and the files were loaded into a semantic search engine to provide both facet-based and text-base search capabilities. The PDS ontology as captured in the Protege tool also provides a more formal definition of the planetary science data model and a means for better management and documentation of the model. (4GO)
More information on this project is available at http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/wiki/display/onto/Ontology+Development . (4ZX)
Funding (4GP)
The Planetary Data System is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Semantic PDS is a technology insertion task with funding from various sources. (4GQ)
Description of the Semantic PDS (4GR)
The PDS data model was developed in the late 1980’s to model the various entities and relationships of interest within the Planetary Science Community. It both prescribes the collection of metadata for the planetary science data archive and was used to design the PDS Catalog, a high level inventory of the data holdings in the archive. The data model, implemented in a relational database management system, supports sophisticated constraint-based searches for data based on their relationships to other entities such as the spacecraft instruments and target bodies that were involved in the collecting the data. (4GS)
The PDS Catalog, an inventory of over one thousand data collections and related entities, represents a domain ontology. The underlying data model was ingested into the Protege tool and then exported as an RDFS/XML formatted file. Data records were extracted from the catalog database and written to an RDF/XML formatted file conforming to the RDFS specifications. The files were then imported into a web-based semantic search engine that allows facet-based and text-based search of PDS datasets and related entities. More importantly, this information can be made available to “semantically aware” software, allowing computers to process and reason about the PDS Catalog. (4GT)
The advent of semantic technologies has provided the means to provide semantic searches for existing data archives. It also suggests the means to support correlative science across science discipline, missions, instruments, and data product types. In addition, semantic technologies afford the means to support data system interoperability by allowing computer processing and reasoning of web information. (4GU)