Although scientists routinely structure their data, they rarely take advantage of this effort. This is understandable: Conventional methods are not designed to exploit structure. Fortunately, the ongoing adoption of well-established (the eXtensible Markup Language, XML) and emerging (the Resource Description Framework, RDF) Web representations is causing this situation to change – by automatically and systematically enhancing the expressivity and richness of scientific data. After briefly reviewing these representations, emphasis is placed on a working geophysical example where this approach is being introduced. Highly consistent with Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the Web, this transformation incorporates the meaning and context required for establishing a Semantic Web of scientific information … and ultimately knowledge.

I used the above as an abstract for a presentation I gave recently to some graduate students, faculty and staff at York University.

This abstract also serves the purpose of placing this blog entry into context.

In addition to the presentation at York, related items include:

• A recently accepted paper on automating the extraction of metadata – this paper will be presented at an upcoming event
• A paper describing an XML-based data model
• A recently presented poster on informal, `bottom-up' ontologies – this poster provides a roadmap for the progression

You can expect more on this thread …