ObsDB: A System for Uniformly Storing and Querying Heterogeneous Observational Data

Shawn Bowers, Jay Kudo, Huiping Cao, Mark P. Schildhauer
2010 2010 IEEE Sixth International Conference on e-Science  
Earth and environmental scientists collect and use a wide range of observational data. This data often exhibits high structural and semantic heterogeneity due to the variety of data collected and the ways in which observational datasets are structured in practice. However, to address questions at broad temporal, geographic, and biological scales, researchers often need to access and combine data from many observational datasets. This paper presents a system called obsdb that helps to address
more » ... se challenges by providing an integrated environment for storing, querying, and analyzing heterogeneous data based on a semantic observational model. The model allows for ontologybased descriptions of observational datasets and provides a common representation for storing observational data. The obsdb system is built on top of standard relational database technology and provides a declarative query language for accessing observations. Integrated support is also provided for exploratory data analysis, allowing users to call analytical scripts created using the R system over stored observational data. Tree[Height Meter, DBH Meter] → Plot[Area MeterSquared, Name] → Site[Name SiteCode] This expression (which follows the notation used in the query language described in Sec. III) is shorthand for an equivalent set of OWL-DL class definitions. For instance, the expression "Site[Name SiteCode]" corresponds to a class Site obs with the following DL definition [14] .
doi:10.1109/escience.2010.24 dblp:conf/eScience/BowersKCS10 fatcat:dilwkm4zefb2jfi4y73unl6ibe