Semantic solutions for integration of federated ocean observations

TLDR

Ocean observing is essential for ecosystem‑based management of public health risk, water quality, and marine resources, yet responsibilities and funding are fragmented across regional, national, and international agencies. The paper examines challenges to shared access to sensor‑derived observations within NOAA’s Integrated Ocean Observing System, which seeks to federate heterogeneous regional ocean data, and evaluates how well three integration approaches meet community needs. The authors compare three integration methods: (1) OGC Sensor Web Enablement, (2) the OpenIOOS Portal that adds semantic interoperability, and (3) their Semantic Service Architecture, which extends SWE with complex ontologies for a more flexible, semantically driven platform. They conclude that the rich‑semantics approach is the most effective, but it requires a higher level of semantic literacy among the ocean‑observation community to realize its full benefits.

Abstract

Ocean observing is critical to the design and development of ecosystem-based management of public health risk, water quality, and living marine resources. Responsibilities and resources for observing the ocean, as for for other global natural resources, are distributed across regional, national and international agencies, with decentralised authority and limited funding. We discuss the challenges for shared access to sensor-derived observations in the context of the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), an initiative of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The system aims to federate heterogenous regional ocean observations. We highlight three technical approaches to integration; the first based on the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) technology. The second, the OpenIOOS Portal, builds on that foundation but adds a measure of semantic interoperability. The third approach, our own Semantic Service Architecture (SSA), is also built upon SWE technologies but makes rich use of complex ontologies and mappings to offer a more flexible, semantically-driven integration platform. We analyse the three approaches for their ability to serve the needs of the ocean-observing community. We conclude that the latter rich-semantics approach is the most effective but requires a more advanced semantic literacy of the ocean observation community to gain the full benefit.