Implementation of Vocabulary Search Concepts into the IOOS Catalog

[robragsdale]

@daf and @neaptide discussed improvements to search capabilities by bringing in concepts that Sara Haines has developed in a GUI to visualize vocabulary term relationships. The first task is for @neaptide to share the tool with Dave foster. The tool uses SPARQL queries to search for terms and relationships. Our objective is to apply this search capability to the catalog to give users the opportunity to match equivalent terms instead of just base string matching. Tasks to implement these search concepts, which may include code, will be formulated on this issue tracker.

[neaptide]

@robragsdale thanks for setting this issue up. I think it should be "Vocabulary Search Concepts" to distinguish this issue from other search issues.

[neaptide]

@robragsdale and @daf here is the repo for the GUI demo https://github.com/nccoos/ioos-vocabulary-viz I was able to get some better functionality out of html form and simple javascript since discussing yesterday.

We might want to dovetail concepts and utility @carueda and @mmisw has implemented a CF tool using similar concepts for at MMI http://mmisw.org/cfsn and documented on https://github.com/mmisw/cfsn

[carueda]

Thanks for mentioning the CFSN tool here! In one of our branches we started tackling one of its goals (https://github.com/mmisw/cfsn/issues/15), which is about including related information about the CF term (that is, via the SKOS relationship properties) as stored in the ORR triple store, but also in other semantic repos (eg. NERC NVS). This preliminary work is deployed at http://mmisw.org/experimental/cfsn_prelimappings/ (please note, this location is temporary, do not share except with people that may want to provide some feedback such as yourselves ; ) ). Hopefully we will find some time soon to "release" this part of the functionality to the more official CFSN site.

[neaptide]

Put the demo GUI behind a permanent CGI-Server at http://www.unc.edu/usr-bin/haines/orrviz.py and linked from repo https://github.com/nccoos/ioos-vocabulary-viz

[emiliom]

@carueda: very nice work with the cfsn! I look forward to using it. @neaptide: ditto for your example demo GUI. I look forward to both seeing it implemented in the IOOS catalog, and borrowing code from it for other applications ;)

FYI (and veering offtopic, sorry), on the topic of CF standard_name navigation and parsing, here are some resources (documentation and online systems) I find useful. Some are outdated, but still pretty useful or demonstrate useful ways of skinning the CF SN cat:

• Parsing CF standard names
• Keyword-centred list for CFmetadata Standard Names. Explained in more detail on an email to the CF list.
• CF Standard Names Organized by facets (from EnvThs/CUNY). And an example from this system, listing terms under the "Vector > Wind" facet

[graybeal]

Ooh, some new ones I hadn't seen, neat!

I am capturing these for the CF FAQ. I am developing, see Is there a grammar for CF standard names?.

[emiliom]

Nice resource, @graybeal! I hope it eventually becomes a part of http://cfconventions.org (which seems like a work in progress right now). BTW, regarding the item "CF Standard Names Organized by facets (from EnvThs/CUNY)" I mentioned, this work is from CUAHSI & Michael Piasecki; one of their goals (I think) was to extract a grammar for CF standard names, and that link was an outcome of that goal. As he said in an email thread two years ago: "we are working on the netCDF CF conventions also which are tricky because of the grammar used and the resulting variable names that are basically concatenations of medium, sitetype, sample procedure, analyte, and what not. We are getting there though". I don't know how successful they were in the end. I think they had a paper in the works.

[neaptide]

Draft of Use Cases for this topic has been posted on the wiki.

[lukecampbell]

:+1: I'd like to see this too.

[emiliom]

Adding my :+1: again -- one vote per year ;)