EnvO Manchester workshop whiteboardnotes

[edit] White Board Notes: Third Environment Ontology Workshop at The University of Manchester, March 13-15, 2008

GAZ: support for Lat Long – Bart Michael
- Must denote CRS (Coordinate Referencing System)
- Roy Lowry mentioned: European Petrochemical Survey Group; Geomatics (Paul Cross), Coastal Atlas Ontologies, EDINA-COMPASS-Edinburgh.
Gaz: New relations that need to be defined – Barry, Michael, Maureen, Mike, Lynn
Gaz: Links relating Gaz terms to EnvO Terms
EnvO: Definitions checked by a Geographer & GIS (Broader buy-in & incentives)
- Mike W mentioned: conference in Utah, GI Science 2008.
EnvO: ditto Ecologist
EnvO: Mass nouns vs Count Nouns – Barry, Norman, Lynn, Suzi
EnvO: Boundaries – Suzi, Barry, Norman
EnvO: Hydrographic vs Physiographic David Mark
- Barry referenced paper ‘ontology of liquids’
EnvO: Habitat vs EnvO vs Region (aka top-level) – Barry, Norman
EnvO: mapping to EUNIS (&other major habitat lists), BODC Vocab server.

Content: Food – Lynn, Bart
- Need to define scope, perspective & utility.
- Discussed economic drivers for such an ontology (things that might spoil). *Human Foodstuffs, Livestock Foodstuffs, Nutrition
Content: Anatomy – Norman, Barry.
- Discussed use of FMA, CARO and consistent use of cross products.
Integration: consistent use of cross-products.
Annotation: Habitat-lite as a pure subset of envo. – Michael, Suzi, Lynette, Dawn.
- Must be implemented. Agreement to use EnvO terms, not just map to them(?)
Annotation: retro-fitting free text – Neil, Lynette, Bart
Annotation: how to ensure consistency in annotation.
Vision: Temporal, geospatial change.
- Don’t address now but need to make sure artifacts will be able to handle it later.
Funding: Documenting who is using Gaz/EnvO
Design principles: Consistent use of cross-products, adjectives. Eg contaminated tropical muddy pool
Funding: Support for Andy Brass cows grant.

It was discussed and concluded that the Food Ontology would be including Food habitats, not food that organisms consume.
We also discussed and determined that the ontology would be based on food items.
The ontology will be kept within Envo, under the environmental matter node

Food Definition: revise the definition and post it to the tracker
- Michael
Review all terms under Food, and determine that they are mass nouns
- Michael, Norman
Move the Food node (and all of it's children) under environmental matter
- [DONE]
For later curation: For cheese: split the cheeses by the organism that produces the milk and the enzymes. It was suggested to have categories of cheese such as french soft cheeses and to use synonyms for the brand names.
Environmental Matter types.
- Brandon to look at modes of classification.
EnvO: Relation between mass nouns (stuff) & count nouns (objects). made_of

Barry, Brandon, Maureen to explore.

Term definitions to add to tracker and discuss:
- sediment (done)
- food
Clean up mass/count nouns under environmental matter. Remove relationships that for terms that are members of both substrate (environmental matter) and features.
term lists: EUNIS, Roy Lowry's BODC ontologies, NCBI.
- Norman, Michael, Lynn
USERS TO HAVE IMPLEMENTED Gaz/EnvO by July 15th 2008
Potential overlap with ontology based GIS via spatial processing software.
- Brandon, Norman, Michael,Lynn to explore.
Categorize Habitat-Lite terms. Lynette add to tracker any terms needed.
- Lynette
Spatial relations synopsis to be circulate by Brandon & Maureen.

Meetings
- possibility to meet if people are at other coinciding conferences.
- Neil to explore funding possibility from EOL.
- self funded meeting. Facilitate with Google calendar. ISMB possibility.
- Fall meeting essential if exploring NIH funding.

Longer term:
- Have definitions checked by a geographer
- Add documentation to the wiki on who is using Gaz