Title: Ontology-based Metadata Portal for Unified Semantics (OlyMPUS)
Presenting Author: Jonathan Gleason
Organization: NASA Langley Research Center
Co-Author(s): Beth Huffer, Lingua Logica LLC

Abstract:
Variations in how data are collected, processed, averaged, gridded, and stored, create challenges for data interoperability and synthesis, which are exacerbated when the volume of available data is extremely large. Robust, semantically rich metadata can support tools for data discovery and access and can facilitate machine-to-machine transactions with services such as data subsetting, regridding, and reformatting. Such capabilities are critical to enabling comprehensive, multivariate analytics that use the full spectrum of data products available in NASA archives.

As metadata requirements increase and competing standards emerge, metadata provisioning becomes increasingly burdensome to data producers. Adequate tools for metadata provisioning are not commonplace and the metadata produced by existing tools is generally coarse-grained and often has no semantic structure. OlyMPUS is an end-to-end system designed to support both data consumers and data providers, enabling the latter to register their data sets and provision them with the semantically rich metadata that drives the Ontology-Driven Interactive Search Environment for Earth Sciences (ODISEES). The OlyMPUS metadata provisioning tool leverages robust semantics, a NoSQL-like database and an automated reasoning engine that implements first- and second-order logic to provide data producers with a semi-automated system for producing semantically rich metadata. The result is robust metadata that accurately describes data sets and the variables they contain in manner that provides data users sufficient detail to support interoperability and automated analytics