Integrated NIS Development Closer

by James W Brunt, (NET)

The road to developing an integrated network information system (NIS) for LTER is becoming a little shorter this year as the LTER information management committee makes progress toward standardized metadata exchange, one of the major hurdles to furthering NIS development.

Since it’s inception in 1996 the LTER the Network Information System has gone from drawing board to the development of multiple prototypes, to the development of an integrated model. The process of planning a framework for integration revealed where work was needed in these critical areas:

• Implementation of a standardized model for LTER metadata. Thanks to supplemental funding to the Network Office by NSF and collaboration by the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity project funded by NSF, workshops are being held to develop and implement Ecological Metadata Language at LTER sites (see EML article in this issue).
• Development of semantic ontologies for LTER studies. Semantic ontologies are structured ways to express the meaning found in somewhat arbitrary naming conventions. Since ecologists don’t use a standardized vocabulary for describing their data or their results, a map is necessary to determine if two data sets are comparable. The LTER Network Office is leading a collaborative effort to fund a project to develop this critical piece of the puzzle.

New Technologies the Rule
During the same period of time that the NIS has been in development, e-commerce exploded on the Internet and the new interest has driven technology in a direction that is beneficial to LTER NIS efforts. With the successful standardization of ecological metadata exchange and the development of semantic ontologies the LTER Network will be poised to use a variety of new and emerging technologies to develop capabilities that have been planned for the LTER NIS:

• Specialized Tools developed for one data set will be interchangeable with others.
• Off-the-shelf smart query mediators will enable queries across data sets.
• Data set integration can be automated.
• Integrated data and metadata repositories will provide a rich information set.

In addition, technologies like Universal Data Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and many data applications will soon be off-the-shelf. For the first time in history the forces that drive technology are going in the same direction that ecologists need to go and LTER is poised to take advantage of it.