Sustainable information model management

Rob Atkinson (CSIRO ICT Centre)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2010-07-29
TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
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ABSTRACT:
For a community to effectively share information between largely autonomous information systems, it is necessary to establish the semantics of each component and the relationships between them. These semantics include information about the structure of information exposed by systems (amessagesa and data sets), and critically the controlled vocabularies required to make content interoperable. Integration may be achieved by hard-coded adaptor components, or by analysis and the building of a bespoke ontology relating the concepts in the two systems together. However, with many systems, evolving over time, a range of such mappings effectively become yet more components to be integrated.

The Sustainable Water Information Models (SWIM) project in WIRADA is looking at the scope for formal information models of component systems to be shared in a acanonicala form, and the feasibility of tools to make this process efficient and reliable.

This seminar will examine the content of such information models, the implications for management of these and the requirements for infrastructure components to enable sharing. These ideas are being tested in a set of experiments with existing communities of practice to realise improved management, quality and efficiency of semantic resources that will in turn allow the WIRADA stakeholders to exploit these resources in operational systems. The seminar will demonstrate and discuss the experimental progress, with a focus on the suite of prototype tools (aSolidGrounda) to support sharing semantic resources. The demonstration will include tools for management of model dependencies, linking models and controlled vocabularies, derivation of implementation artefacts from models, simplified data dictionary interfaces, version management and reverse engineering existing systems, and contrast these with the disjointed manual processes currently in use. A roadmap for future research and experimental validation of the emerging methodologies communities will be discussed.
BIO:
Rob Atkinson is a research scientist in the Environmental; Information Systems Program of CSIRO Land and Water.

Since gaining a MSc (Hons) Research in microprocessor design, Robas interests have been grounded in the real world: in interoperability of natural resources information, in particular spatial information access over the Internet. He was one of the first practitioners to deploy integrated maps and databases on the Web, and active in the emergence of the Open Geospatial Consortium standards for web services.

After working with many communities nationally and internationally to develop technical and information standards to improve interoperability he has been researching means to overcome the major hurdles in information integration. Currently this is largely focussed on the water resources domain, but his research includes providing support and analysing interoperability issues in the geosciences, soils, land administration, humanitarian development and crisis management, meteorology and others.