POWDER as enabling technology for the semantic interoperability of agricultural repositories

Current approaches to the interoperability of heterogeneous resources typically maintain coordinated clones over which querying infrastructure operates. In the case of large-scale repositories, and especially when no single schema is clearly established so that the problem can be reduced to transforming legacy data, a more dynamic approach would be a benefit. In many real-world situation, how- ever, useful queries need to combine information from different sources that are actively maintained in incompatible schemata and are too large to systematically clone. Examples include the various agricultural resource repositories and databases such as meteorological archives and GIS.


In this position paper we explore the applicability of the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) as infrastructure for the efficient and distributed retrieval of the meta-information needed to dynamically re-write queries in one schema to the (set of) semantically equivalent queries that need to be executed over the various heterogeneous schemata. This enables information providers to publish information in any schema as long as POWDER is used to annotate their repository with the coordination-related meta-information. Querying engines can then exploit existing and established resource discovery mechanisms implemented over the POWDER protocol to retrieve the meta-information pertinent to any single triple pattern in a query and use that to dynamically perform query rewriting.


Contributed by Pythagoras Karampiperis, Stasinos Konstantopoulos and Vangelis Karkaletsis.

View/download submitted paper from HERE.
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Introducing a content integration process for a federation of agricultural institutional repositories

Aggregating metadata from various sources often raises practical issues, such as incompatibility between the different metadata application profiles (AP) used as well as quality aspects of the metadata used. In the case of repositories hosting agricultural-related content, the existence of various metadata AP with significant differences between them makes the effort of interconnecting these repositories a difficult task. 


This paper proposes a process for integrating different agricultural scientific content repositories and a workflow that should be followed in the context of populating the repository. Although the proposed solution refers to repositories with agricultural content, the same process can be followed in the case of repositories with different content. This process was proposed under the VOA3R project which is funded by the European Commission’s ICT PSP Programme.


Contributed by Vassilios Protonotarios, Laura Gavrilut, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Ilias 
Hatzakis and Miguel-Angel Sicilia.


View/download submitted paper from HERE.
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