2007-12-28: Lab DataSpaces

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Data typically resisde in databases or structured data files. Metadata are ususally "headers" or separate files attached to the data. Effectively combining data and the evolving metadata is a challenging endevour.

Recently, we have been exploring the use of the wiki technologies to contain the metadata and to link it to the data. Example application include

• DataSpaces for desribing air quality datasets,
• EventPages to aggregate metadata on air pollution events and
• LabDataSpaces for describing data from laboratory experiments, e.g. PEMWiki

A characteristic of these combined Data-Metadata systems is that

• Data prvoder exposes the data on the web in a computer-readatblr form
• A wrapper software
  • Reads the existing data/metadata
  • Translates (XSL) the metadata into a wiki XML
  • Creates a wiki page for each dataset, fully equiped with content, structure, tags.

The resulting (semantic) wiki DataSpace pages can then be filtered, aggregated, exported for other uses.