Background on Curator's Early Ontological Development

NMM

Initially, Curator worked closely with its European partners in the development of the Numerical Model Metadata (NMM) schema. This schema attempted to develop an international standard for the description of model components.

Collaboration with ESG

In 2005, Curator began to collaborate with the Earth System Grid (ESG), a semantic web project designed to host, search, and browse climate datasets. ESG already had a fledgling ontology for the description of geoscience datasets. The Curator team worked closely with ESG to expand and enhance their ontology to also represent model components. This was accomplished by taking relevant pieces of the NMM ontology and plugging it into ESG.

The ESG ontology was expanded further through the support of the 2008 NCAR Advanced Study Program (ASP) colloquium entitled Numerical Techniques for Global Atmospheric Models. This colloquium consisted of thirteen atmospheric dynamical cores running a series of 22 idealized test cases at five resolutions. New metadata was developed to describe, and compare these dynamical cores. This exercise indicated that a bottom up approach to the development of model metadata can be both valid and potentially more rapid. Curator is currently looking for another model inter-comparison project (MIPS) to expand its ontology further.

The future direction of ontological development in the Curator/ESG partnership will be to focus on the development of an ontology sufficient to describe IPCC data.