Sharing Our Understanding Of Earth Science Resources

GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University Sharing Our Understanding Of Earth Science Resources A knowledge management portal to support collaborative geoscience Mark Gahegan Bill Pike Sachin Oswal Gary Sheppard Gary Liu Brandi Nagle Junyan Luo www.geongrid.org

Introduction, motivation & year 2 goal • Making electronic geoscience resources more available is not enough… • We need to be able to describe these resources more effectively… • To be successful, contributing and finding resources must become an integral part of the way scientists/educators work • Major goal for year 2…Develop visually-based tools to help geoscientists organize, describe, and gain access to the GEON resources www.geongrid.org

instantiation ´ conceptualization Knowledge management for collaborative geoscience Representation • top-down ontology languages • bottom-up context, situations (provenance) • visual appearance, signification • history & evolution • alternative descriptions Capture • collaborative web interface • diagramming tools • text mining tools • importing existing ontologies • workflow discovery Usage • ontology mediation services • ontology similarity measures • browsing conceptual structures • shared virtual workspace www.geongrid.org

Representation • Ontology languages (OWL, RDF, DAML+OIL) • Association histories of how resources are used • Visual appearance / signification serialization • Additional descriptive information / resources </owl:Class> <owl:Class rdf:ID="Marsh"> <rdfs:subClassOfrdf:resource="#CoastalRegion"/> <rdfs:subClassOfrdf:resource="#WetlandRegion"/> </owl:Class> … Fragment of OWL ontology from NASA’s EarthRealm project www.geongrid.org

Contextualizing science “In science, numerous lines of investigation interweave to delineate a type of rationality that is historically situated and practical, and involves choice, deliberation, and judgment.” Richard Bernstein Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis • Richard Bernstein • Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis Our aim is to contextualize resources through experiences; this is crucial for understanding in domains that are highly interpretive Put another way, what do feeding ducks have in common with 50% of our understanding? www.geongrid.org

Three problems with a solely ontological approach • Top down knowledge (ontologies) only get you so far… other kinds of (bottom up) knowledge are also very important & useful • Use-cases (situations surrounding the use of resources) • Social networks • Most current ontologies are static resources… • Our understanding is dynamic & continually evolving • Unless ontologies are community-owned, dynamic resources they will soon become part of the problem, not part of the solution • What happens to all the thousands of resources that predate ontologies? • The cost of retro-fitting ontologies is prohibitive. www.geongrid.org

Associations www.geongrid.org

Amazon Web Services, degrees of separation using the Amazing (Kevin) Baconizer(www.baconizer.com) From"How Maps Work" by MacEachren, Alanto "Oops I Did It Again" by Spears, Britney: 12 hops – People who bought: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design - By Alan M. MacEachren also bought: Web Cartography - By M-J Kraak and Allan Brown People who bought this also bought: Seeing Through Maps: The Power of Images to Shape Our World View - By Ward Kaiser and Denis Wood Mapping: An Illustrated Guide to Graphic Navigational Systems - By Robert Fawcett-Tan What is a Designer: Things, Places, Messages - By N Potter and R Kinross Reinventing the Wheel - By Jessica Helfand Photobooth - By Babbette Hines MTV Photobooth - By MTV and Rizzoli International Publications Stages - By Britney Spears and Sheryl Berk Britney Spears - By Britney Spears Baby One More Time (+5 Bonus Tracks) - By Britney Spears Oops I Did It Again - By Britney Spears www.geongrid.org

Capturing use-cases Who created that concept / resource? When was it created? Has it been modified recently? Who has used it? … What did they do with it? Such questions add a rich context by capturing situations surrounding resource usage www.geongrid.org

Resource usage data logged usage data (Oracle, MySQL) www.geongrid.org

Mining association rules from use-case logs • Association rules are mined from user action logs (uses the WEKA (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) API that implemented the Apriori algorithm (Agrawal, R. and Srikant, R., 1994). • Tools added for data preprocessing and classifying: • attribute selector: allows user to select a subset of data attributes. • data filters: allows user to define filters to convert String, Time, Numeric data in any attribute column to nominal data for association mining. www.geongrid.org

Data mining tools (association rules) Results & sensitivity settings Data Filter - String Attribute Selector Design Data Filter - Numeric Data Filter - Time www.geongrid.org

Capture: concept creation & harvesting (Codex, e-Delphi) www.geongrid.org

Captureexample(Randy Keller’s gravity map from previous GEON meeting) www.geongrid.org

Supplemental material: e.g. educational resources www.geongrid.org

Supplemental material: e.g. Google search results www.geongrid.org

Google search(Google search API is built into Codex) www.geongrid.org

Usage codex demonstration www.geongrid.org

www.geongrid.org

Managing groups & user workspaces www.geongrid.org

Reusable knowledge structures afford… • Private and shared knowledge spaces for describing resources • Provenance information produces a web of relationships between resources • Evolution and emergence of ideas within a community • Discovery of points of agreement and divergence in concept construction or problem-solving approaches http://flatbox.geog.psu.edu/codex www.geongrid.org

Example: questions you can ask Gravitational anomaly dataset A • Is described by these concept map(s) / ontologies: • Was created in this way: • Plays a role in these workflow(s): • Has been used to fulfill these task(s): • Has been used by these people: • Is most often used with these method(s) • Has received the following review(s) / feedback: • Is similar to, or differs from, anomaly dataset B in the following way(s): www.geongrid.org

Future plans • Add more perspectives onto resources into Codex (e.g. working with Digital Library for Earth Science Education (DLESE)) • Improve transition from one perspective to another • Peer-to-peer implementation • Improve transition between semi-formal concept maps (provided by domain scientists) and formal (computable) ontologies that are defined more rigorously. • Experiment with Codex used live to capture conceptual understanding (face to face and over the Web) www.geongrid.org

Summary:projects we are perusing for GEON • Concept map / ontology visualization & management tools (ConceptVista & Codex): searching & browsing of knowledge domains, and other resources. • Concept capture software (e-Delphi, Codex): developing vocabularies by which resources and learning activities are described • Concept map / ontology versioning and comparison (differencing) • Concept uncertainty (fuzzy-rough set approach) • Use-Case Tools: logging and data mining (association rules) • Visualization and analysis tools: e.g. animated maps, scatterplots, 3D scenes, cluster analysis, machine learning methods • Component assembly and deployment (GeoVISTA Studio): could help in selecting and packaging activities into self-contained, deployable units. • Managing learning activities: Learning Activity Toolkit (Southampton, UK & PSU) • Integration of concept management with DLESE API & strand maps www.geongrid.org

Publications • Pike W., Gahegan M, 2003, “Constructing semantically scalable cognitive spaces”, in: Spatial Information Theory: Foundations of Geographic Information Science. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2825, Kuhn W, Worboys M, and Timpf S (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin: 332-348. • MacEachren A M, Gahegan M, Pike W, 2004, “Geovisualization for constructing and sharing concepts”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 101. • Gahegan M, Pike W, Ahlqvist O, Neff R, Yu C, “How much do we agree? A knowledge management system to help represent and mediate concepts developed by collaborating human-environment researchers” submitted to Annals of the Association of American Geographers. • Gahegan, (2004). “Beyond tools: visual support for the entire process of GIScience. “ In: Exploring Visualization (Eds. Dykes, J., MacEachren, M. and Kraak, J.-M.) • Brodaric, B. and Gahegan, M. (in press) “Representing Geoscientific Knowledge in Cyberinfrastructure: challenges, approaches and implementations”. GSA Special Papers volume. • O’Brien, J. and Gahegan, M. (2004). “A knowledge framework for representing, manipulating and reasoning with geographic semantics.” International Conference on Spatial Data Handling, Leicester. • Gahegan, M. (2004). “The Future of GIScience? GRID Computing and the Semantic Web”. Keynote address, GISRUK Conference, www.gisruk.org • Pike W, Yarnal B, MacEachren A, Gahegan M, Yu C, (in press) “Infrastructure for collaboration: Building the future for local environmental change”, to appear in Environment. • Pike W. A., Ahlqvist O., Gahegan M., Oswal S., “Capturing context in collaborative science: Supporting collaborative science through a knowledge and data management portal,” Workshop on Semantic Web Technologies for Searching and Retrieving Scientific Data, at Second International Semantic Web Conference, Sanibel Island, FL, October 2003. www.geongrid.org

end Questions? www.geongrid.org

Supplemental slides www.geongrid.org

Concept Hierarchies Style Editor Concept Graph Managing and sharing visual appearance Styles describe how concepts should be rendered. Different concepts can have different styles using property filters Styles can be serialized using XML-based Styled-Layered Descriptor Language, (SLD) A Hierarchical View of the Concepts Concepts are listed Alphabetically Currently We Support RDF, OWL, and XML. Concepts are Represented as Nodes, and their relations are represented as Edges. www.geongrid.org

Cyber-Infrastructure: underlying technologies • Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Computing, software technology that enables networked computers to communicate (exchange information) without a common operating environment. • The Information Power Grid (IPG) and Globus provide protocols • Web Services, provide standards to describe, find & access remote resources. • Web services mechanisms are integrated into the Grid model through the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). • Semantic Web, describing and searching for web content using formalized semantics (controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies) • … as opposed to the current ‘chaos’, largely based on literals, popularity & corporate sponsorship! • Collaborative Knowledge Environments, • Data & Knowledge portals • Asynchronous discussions • Video conferencing www.geongrid.org

Towards a knowledge collaboratory www.geongrid.org

An Integrated Approach to Distributed GeoCollaboration infrastructure for geoscience infrastructure for e-government/e-society infrastructure for homeland security National Map Digital Earth Geospatial One-Stop NGA: NSGI gesopatial infrastructure GEON HERO n o K w l e d w g e e N integrating knowledge Semantic web Ontology and concept browsers acquiring knowledge applying knowledge Collaboratories Ontology creation Collaborative visualization Browsing & querying knowledge Visually mediating understanding Knowledge Infrastructure constructing & accessing knowledge Group Work with geospatial information & technologies Supporting knowledge evolution Existing metadata standards Ontology mining / harvesting Dialogue-enabled interface Off-loading ideas research advances (in gray) leveraged to meet challenges (in blue) Representing and sharing perspectives Semantic indexing Enabling negotiation Content-object replication kit (CORK) Automated indexing tools Semantic search Supporting knowledge communities Making decisions Meta-search (ensemble techniques) Supporting work practices Distributing access to knowledge Geospatial data repositories e-Delphi, ConceptVISTA, & argument visualization e c E i f t f c e a c r t i P v e Emergency response & recovery Geo / Environmental science K-12 science & professional development Public/civic planning/resource management Strategic threat assessment application domains advancing science supporting homeland security enhancing prosperity & civil society www.geongrid.org

Contexts: www.geongrid.org

Sharing Our Understanding Of Earth Science Resources