Background and Motivation

The ESIP Community Ontology Repository started life as part of the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project's web services. MMI created an Ontology Registry and Repository -- ORR -- to let members of the marine and earth science communities easily create and store simple semantic content (vocabularies) in a way that combined with the semantic web.

The ESIP Federation saw an opportunity to re-purpose this software as a learning and evaluation tool for the ESIP community. By deploying the ORR as an ESIP-focused service, it would be available to a wide earth science community, and could provide different services that could be considered alongside the existing ESIP Semantic Repository.

Interestingly, both ESIP repositories are based on the National Center for Biological Ontologies' BioPortal software, which is maintained by Stanford University. (See http://bioportal.org for their working service, dedicated to biomedical ontologies.) The existing ESIP repository uses the current Bioportal system, while MMI's ORR (and the Community Ontology Repository to be deployed) are based on a specific, older release of Bioportal.

So this COR service will be offered as a testing and training tool for ESIP to consider as it moves forward toward supporting more extensive ontology services. The two portals each have their own perspective on the purpose and format of ontologies, and the comparison should provide plenty of food for thought, and practical experience, to the ESIP community.