A methodology for semantic integration of metadata in bioinformatics data sources
Proceedings of the 43rd annual Southeast regional conference - Volume 1
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Directory services provide a mechanism to describeinternal resources that can be dynamically discoveredand used, and are increasingly being adopted byorganizations. Despite being in an era of extensiveinterorganizational collaboration, relatively littleattention has been given to extending directory servicesacross organizational boundaries. In particular,resources described using directory services are either(a) constrained by description possibilities or (b) cannotbe widely understood due to idiosyncratic descriptionmechanisms. Thus, current directory services approachesare not well suited for the information requirements ofgroups of individuals spanning organizationalboundaries: communities of interest (COIs). A COI is avirtual community that benefits from electroniccommunication, especially by the ability to providestructured descriptions of relevant resources. This paperdescribes a new approach to support COIs throughdirectory services by enabling autonomous entities toprovide structured, evolutionary descriptions of membersand resources while retaining directory services' corestrength: structured, semantically coherent descriptionsof resources. The requirements architecture is derived, awalkthrough of the architectural elements is given, and aresearch prototype is briefly described.