Elements of i4Life Cross Mapping Demonstration & Summary

Andrew Jones, Chang Liu, Richard White

DRAFT 6th September 2011

Introduction

This document summarises the key elements of the Cross-mapping demonstration which is being developed at Cardiff University, and which will be demonstrated and presented at the i4Life WP2 meeting in Berlin on 13/14 September 2011.

An extended, more detailed document will be made available in time for that meeting, which explains (for example) the reasoning performed by the rules which we have thus far developed. Also, it should be noted that the integration of the various elements listed here is on-going work, so that, at the moment, users need to know more details of the inner structure of the system than would be appropriate when they commence using it in earnest.

Elements of the Demonstration

We are developing software on three, closely-related fronts:
  1. Stand-alone tools for data preparation, experimentation with cross-mapping rules, etc.
  2. Web interface to these tools
  3. Web services for accessing tools programmatically
These are closely related, of course, and we anticipate that users will only want to employ (2) and (3) directly.

Cross-mapping stages

There are a number of stages in creating a cross-map:
  1. Putting data into a "canonical form": currently the canonical form is a simplified database schema, and we can import from the CoL and NCBI schemas; in due course we anticipate importing from a more generally-applicable format (a version of Darwin Core Archive).
  2. Importing the data into a form usable by the cross-mapping software: this involves creating an OWL representation of the data.
  3. "Interlinking": identifying names which are common between checklists that are being cross-mapped
  4. Cross-mapping: applying SWRL rules to determine relationships between taxa in the lists being cross-mapped. This includes identifying relationships between the sets of names, and further identifying "taxonomic" relationships implied.
  5. Retrieval services: retrieving entire cross-maps, querying cross-maps, etc.
At present: The relationships currently inferred are: