There are two main considerations for exploring the geoscientific meaning of e-resources: the top-down defined domain ontology and conventional metadata, and the bottom-up emergent meaning carried in how the resource are used by users (epistemology: which can be captured in workflows, in provenance meta-data and even in the interactions between people.).
The primary argument of this article is that whether ontological or epistemological, no single one of these web threads is sufficient to carry the essence of meaning. A review of ontology base on this article is made in a SWOT analysis in the figure below, where current engineering methods are considered along with those of the data integration (the Strength table).
Using a case study of a knowledge portal GEON to illustrate their main argum
ents, problems of accessing to e-resources are:(1) large resource
(2) dynamic nature of catalogs
(3) varieties of search strategies of user needs
(4) meanings of resource
Suggested solutions to these difficulties include:
(1)adopting a visualize-on-demand strategy, and visualizing multiple perspectives which highlight connections or overlaps among the e-resources,
(2) classifying resources into 4 categories and 18 subcategories, and translating resource descriptions into RDF triples.
Problems (3) and (4) are tackled together by augmenting ontologies. The authors augment ontologies by a
dding situational knowledge initiated from:(i) meaning resides in a nexus of interactions (Whitehead, 1929-1997), thus a knowledge nexus can support multiple strands of meaning.
(ii) semiotics that according to different subject of interest, nodes can change their semiotic role in the nexus (Sowa, 1999-2002).
In short, the authors add use-cases, provenance data, social networks and workflows, to ontology, through the use of Perspectives(global and local), as a pragmatic aspect to understand meaning and definition of e-resource. In particular, perspective filters, defined against an OWL model, facilitate examination of a subset of connections within a complex concept space in a manner that suits thematic exploration.
p.s. GEON is an open collaborative project started in 2002 funded under the NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) program . The aim is to develop CyberInfrastructure, a vision in the U.S. while e-Science is in the Europe, that the need of a comprehensive infrastructure to capitalize on dramatic advances in information technology in support of data sharing and integration.