DIA: A Web Services-based Infrastructure for Semantic Integration in Geoinformatics

We present DIA, a Web services-based infrastructure for the Discovery, Integration, and Analysis of geoscience data, tools, and services. DIA provides a collaborative environment where scientists can share their resources (e.g., geochemical data, filtering services, etc.) by registering them through well-defined ontologies. We have developed a planetary materials ontology in OWL for this purpose. The ontology is used by different geoscientists (using Web services) to explore, extract, and integrate information from different heterogeneous data sets. The DIA system is now in its final pre-release phase. It is currently made accessible to a few geoscientists for conducting usability analyses, and it will eventually be made available to the community at large through the geoscience portal (GEON) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.