I attended the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project workshop in Boulder, CO last week. The MMI Project has long-term goals that include merging scientific data together from various sources to ease data querying using keywords across separate ontologies. Currently there exists many datasets, each with their own set of vocabularly words (for attributes, units, etc). Searching for data in one dataset may require different vocabularly keywords than those searched in a second dataset. It is a limitation for the user to not realize all possible keywords when performing a data search. MMI aims to alleviate this problem by mapping and merging like terms spanning various ontologies, ultimately providing more power to search engines by recognizing relationships between ontologies and returning more results.

We were separated in different domain groups for the workshop:

• CTD
• Waves and Currents
• Chlorophyll
• Sensors
• Benthic Habitat
• PaCOOS

Each team mapped terms across ontologies that were specific to that team’s domain. The three basic relations used in the mapping process were ’sameAs’, ‘narrowerThan’, and ‘broaderThan’. All of the ontology and mapping files are stored as OWL documents, and the mapping files were made available online at the end of the workshop. This initiative is a hopeful stepping stone for future mapping work and crosswalks between ontologies.