The WebSemantics project considers the third challenge of locating and accessing relevant repositories on the WWW.
Many collections of scientific data in particular disciplines, e.g., the environmental sciences, are available today around the world. Most of these data sources are compliant with some standard for interoperable access. In addition, a standard schema (data types) and a common semantics (meaning for the types) may be supported. However, sharing data among a global community of users is still difficult because of a lack of standards for the following necessary functions: (i) data providers need a standard for describing or publishing available sources of data; (ii) data administrators need a standard for discovering the location and metadata (data types and domains) of published sources; and (iii) users need a standard for accessing this discovered data.
All of these tasks come under the umbrella of Dynamic Location and Assembly of Web-based Data and the WebSemantics project provides tools for accomplishing these tasks. The WebSemantics architecture and protocols, used for the publication, discovery and access to scientific data, is an extension of the World Wide Web architecture and protocols. We describe a standard format for the exchange of metadata. We define a language for discovering sources and querying the data in these sources, and we provide a formal semantics for this language.
WebSemantics is a system that gives ``equal-time'' to data access on the WWW. Our goal is to support a world-wide community of users who share data with the same economy and ease with which documents are currently shared.
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