Semantically-Enabled Virtual Observatories: VSTO Highlights (for Observational Data)Deborah McGuinnessActing Director and Senior Research ScientistKnowledge Systems, AI LaboratoryStanford Universitydlm@ksl.stanford.eduhttp://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm CEO McGuinness Associates

Joint work with Peter Fox, Luca Cinquini, Patrick West, Jose Garcia, James Benedict, Don MiddletonPartially funded by NSF

Virtual Observatory Use CaseScientists should be able to access a global, distributed knowledge base of scientific data that appears to be integrated and locally available General form of a query: retrieve data (from appropriate collections) subject to (stated and implicit) constraints and create a representation of the data in a manner appropriate for the data and for the end-user Specific Solar Terrestrial examples:1. Plot the Neutral Temperature (Parameter) taken by the Millstone Hill Fabry-Perot interferometer (Instrument) looking in the vertical direction from 1/1/2000 8/31/2000 as a time series. 2. Find data, representing the state of the neutral atmosphere anywhere above 100km and toward the Arctic circle (above 45N) at times of high geomagnetic activity.

TermsObservatory: A physical location in which observations are made. Instrument: An object that measures phenomenon or parameters.Data Archive: A collection of information, a file, set of files, or database made available is machine readable form with associated metadata concerning the datas origin, purpose and use.Data product: A formalized and reproducible representation of data elements for consumption by a user or machine process.Observation:Wikipedia: an activity of a sapient or sentient living being (e.g. humans), which senses and assimilates the knowledge of a phenomenon in its framework of previous knowledge and ideas. Observation is more than the bare act of observing: To perform observation, a being must observe and seek to add to its knowledge. Merriam Webster: an act of recognizing and noting a fact or occurrence often involving measurement with instruments Operationally: Observational data is data collected using instruments working in operating modes operated by observatories at particular locations at particular times measuring phenomena or parameters.

In W3C Ontology rec:OWL

VSTO Highlights: Capabilities, Tools, ExtensibilityReasoning provides new capabilities:Unified query workflowDecreased input requirements for query: in one base reducing the number of selections from eight to threeInterface generates only syntactically correct queries: which was not always ensurable in previous implementations without semanticsSemantic query support: by using background ontologies and a reasoner, our application has the opportunity to only expose coherent querySemantic integration: in the past users had to remember (and maintain codes) to account for numerous different ways to combine and plot the data whereas now semantic mediation provides the level of sensible data integration requiredunderstanding of coordinate systems, relationships, data synthesis, transformations, etc.A broader range of potential users (PhD scientists, students, professional research associates and those from outside the fields)Easily extensible:Use existing ontology tools to expand ontologyTested in SESDI volcanoes, plate tectonics, atmosphereMust be monotonic extensions to model

Extra

Content: Coupling Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions WEBCommunity data archive for observations and models of Earth's upper atmosphere and geophysical indices and parameters needed to interpret them. Includes browsing capabilities by periods, instruments, models,

Content: Mauna Loa Solar ObservatoryNear real-time data from Hawaii from a variety of solar instruments. Source for space weather, solar variability, and basic solar physics Other content used too CISM Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling

Content: VolcanoesMt. Spurr, AK. 8/18/1992 eruption, USGShttp://www.avo.alaska.edu/image.php?id=319

Eruption cloud movement from Mt.Spurr, AK,1992USGS

Tropopausehttp://aerosols.larc.nasa.gov/volcano2.swf

Atmosphere Use CaseDetermine the statistical signatures of both volcanic and solar forcings on the height of the tropopause From paleoclimate researcher Caspar Ammann Climate and Global Dynamics Division of NCAR - CGD/NCAR

Layperson perspective: - look for indicators of acid rain in the part of the atmosphere we experience (look at measurements of sulfur dioxide in relation to sulfuric acid after volcanic eruptions at the boundary of the troposphere and the stratosphere)

Nasa funded effort with Fox - NCAR, Sinha - Va. Tech, Raskin - JPL

Use Case detail: A volcano eruptsPreferentially its a tropical mountain (+/- 30 degrees of the equator) with acidic magma; more SiO2, and it erupts with great intensity so that material and large amounts of gas are injected into the stratosphere. The SO2 gas converts to H2SO4 (Sulfuric Acid) + H2O (75% H2SO4 + 25% H2O). The half life of SO2 is about 30 - 40 days. The sulfuric acid condensates to little super-cooled liquid droplets. These are the volcanic aerosol that will linger around for a year or two.Brewer Dobson Circulation of the stratosphere will transport aerosol to higher latitudes. The particles generate great sunsets, most commonly first seen in fall of the respective hemisphere. The sunlight gets partially reflected, some part gets scattered in the forward direction. Result is that the direct solar beam is reduced, yet diffuse skylight increases. The scattering is responsible for the colorful sunsets as more and more of the blue wavelength are scattered away.in mid-latitudes the volcanic aerosol starts to settle, but most efficient removal from the stratosphere is through tropopause folds in the vicinity of the storm tracks. If particles get over the pole, which happens in spring of the respective hemisphere, then they will settle down and fall onto polar ice caps. Its from these ice caps that we recover annual records of sulfate flux or deposit. We get ice cores that show continuous deposition information. Nowadays we measure sulfate or SO4(2-). Earlier measurements were indirect, putting an electric current through the ice and measuring the delay. With acids present, the electric flow would be faster. What we are looking for are pulse like events with a build up over a few months (mostly in summer, when the vortex is gone), and then a decay of the peak of about 1/e in 12 months. The distribution of these pulses was found to follow an extreme value distribution (Frechet) with a heavy tail.

Use Case detail: climateSo reflection reduces the total amount of energy, forward scattering just changes the beam, path length, but that's it. The dry fogs in the sky (even after thunderstorm) still up there, thus stratosphere not troposphere. The tropical reservoir will keep delivering aerosol for about two years after the eruption.The particles are excellent scatterers in short wavelength. They do absorb in NIR and in IR. Because of absorption, there is a local temperature change in the lower stratosphere. This temperature change will cause some convective motion to further spread the aerosol, and second: Its good factual stuff. Once it warms up, it will generate a temperature gradient. Horizontal temperature gradients increase the baroclinicity and thus storms, and they speedup the local zonal winds. This change in zonal wind in high latitudes is particularly large in winter. This increased zonal wind (Westerly) will remove all cold air that tries to buildup over winter in high arctic. Therefore, the temperature anomaly in winter time is actually quite okay.Impact of volcanoes is to cool the surface through scattering of radiation. In winter time over the continents there might be some warming. In the stratosphere, the aerosol warm. The amount of GHG emitted is comparably small to the reservoir in the air. The hydrologic cycle responds to a volcanic eruption.

Atmosphere (portions from SWEET)

Atmosphere II

As web applications proliferate, more users (both people and agents) find themselves faced with decisions about when and why to trust application advice. In order to trust information obtained from arbitrary applications, users need to understand how the information was obtained and what it depended upon. Particularly in web applications that may use question answering systems that may be heuristic or incomplete or data that is either of unknown origin or may be out of date, it becomes more important to have information about how answers were obtained. Emerging web systems will return answers augmented with Meta information about how answers were obtained. In this talk, Deborah McGuinness will describe an approach that can improve trust in answers generated from web applications by making the answer process more transparent. The added information is aimed to provide users (humans or agents) with answers to questions of trust, reliability, recency, and applicability. While this is an area of active research, there are technologies and implementations that can be used today to increase application trustability. The talk will include descriptions of a few representative applications using this approach.Dr. Deborah McGuinness a leading expert in ontology-based tools and applications, knowledge representation and reasoning languages. She is co-editor of the Ontology Web Language. Deborah runs the Stanford Inference Web (IW) effort, which provides a framework for explaining answers from heterogeneous web applications.Inference Web is joint work with Pinheiro da Silva, Fikes, Chang, Glass, Ding, Deshwal, Narayanan, Miller, Zeng, Jenkins, Millar, Bhaowal, http://www.avo.alaska.edu/images/popular_images.php Aerial view, looking north, of the eruption column from the Crater Peak vent, Mount Spurr volcano. A light-tan cloud ascending from pyroclastic flows is visible at right. The 3,374-m (11,070 ft)-high summit lava dome complex of Mount Spurr is visible at left. Photograph by R. McGimsey, U.S. Geological Survey, August 18, 1992. A month later it erupted, note impact within 3 days of a large portion of a continentschematic of sources of atmospheric disruption what they are and where they occur in the atmosphere and how they show up after the eruption in terms of a climate process - moderately well understood processes BUT data is everywhere under many different controls

From nasa: The importance of the study of stratospheric aerosol is not one that readily connects with the general public. This not too surprising since aerosol in the stratosphere can be seen with the naked eye (in the form of luminous sunsets following large volcanic eruptions) only a few times over the course of a lifetime. Similarly, consider that under nominal non-volcanic background conditions that the stratosphere contains about 1Tg (1 megatonne). If this material were deposited uniformly onto the surface of the Earth, it would result in a layer only about 1-nm thick or less than one ten-thousandth of the width of a human hair. With this in mind, it is not difficult to image that the general public may not appreciate the important role that stratospheric aerosol can play in climate. However, in this era of shrinking science dollars, it is required to develop coherent arguments for continued research and investment into what is almost by definition an esoteric field. Types of physical quantities between volcano and climate that need to be related. We need to integrate underlying data from heterogeneous sources - schematic of sources of atmospheric disruption what they are and where they occur in the atmosphere and how they show up after the eruption in terms of a climate process - moderately well understood processes BUT data is everywhere under many different controlsStatistical signature relation between 2 physical quantities (thus we augmented the ontology around these terms)A layperson might be interested in looking for example at signs of acid rain (in relation to measurements of sulfur dioxide) at a particular portion of the atmosphere such as the troposphere i.e. the part of the atmosphere we experienceCaspar ammann ucar acid rain one physical quantity that is measured after the volcano erupts, satellite measures sulfer dioxide over volcano one example of a statistics signature is the relationship between these 2 measured physical quantitiesClimate expert at ucar caspar ammann