Scientific Annotation Middleware (SAM)

1. Scientific Annotation Middleware (SAM) Jim Myers, Elena Mendoza PNNL Al Geist, Jens Schwidder ORNL

2. SAM Vision • Develop a lightweight, flexible middleware to support the creation and use of metadata and annotations • Enable the sharing of annotations among portals and problem solving environments, software agents, scientific applications, and electronic notebooks • Improve the completeness, accuracy, and availability of the scientific record.

3. Current Practice • Electronic notebooks offer users dynamic free-form annotation, but without machine-readable semantics • Databases offer user and programmatic access to well-described, but pre-defined data • A growing number of scientific environments, portals, agents, and applications are defining and using metadata (e.g. data pedigrees), but cannot share it due to incompatible systems and schema • This metadata is an integral part of the scientific record and needs to be managed across applications

4. Project Goals • Provide middleware to support generation, storage, search, translation, navigation, … of • Metadata (owner, type, classification) • Semantic relationships (data pedigree, dependencies) • Notebook-specific metadata and relationships • Design • Layered annotation services • Service interfaces • Client-side components • Component-based notebook interface • Security implementation and data store agnostic Scientific Annotation Middleware Electronic Notebook Interface Notebook Services Data records mgmt., annotation Applications timestamps, signatures Archives import/export/archive Search & Components and Service Interfaces Data Store Interface Semantic Navigation Agents Services Web Metadata Management Services Problem Solving Environments

5. How does SAM differ from an electronic notebook? • SAM • Is primarily middleware • Relies on external data stores accessed through industry-standard protocols • Separates the capabilities for managing annotations from functionality needed for official records/notebooks • Useful for many non-notebook knowledge management applications • Treats notebook interfaces as just one of many possible clients: all have equal access

6. Importance • Further automation of research processes will require the ability for programs to understand and exchange information about data and relationships between data • A middleware layer that supports interoperability between programs at the syntactic and semantic levels will remove a significant barrier to the development of advanced scientific records management and problem solving systems.

7. Technical Challenges • Many of the underlying technologies for encoding semantic information are still in development • SAM must balance between being a deployable system that can address current needs for data pedigrees and records issues and a research platform for investigating automated reasoning about scientific data

8. Proposed Timetable *A transitional notebook, based on DOE2000 capabilities, is planned early in the project to provide forward data-compatibility with the SAM notebook interface

9. Contact Info • Project lead: Jim Myers (Jim.Myers@pnl.gov) • Website: http://collaboratory.pnl.gov/docs/collab/sam/ • Includes project overview and technical overview documents • Software download, project status, and email list information will be available