Current and Future Uses of OWL for Scientific Data Frameworks: Successes and Limitations

Based on almost three years of experience in developing and deploying scientific data frameworks built using semantic technologies, we now have a production virtual observatory in operation, serving two broad communities: solar physics and terrestrial upper atmospheric physics. Within this application, a data framework provides online location, retrieval, and analysis services to a variety of heterogeneous scientific data sources that are often highly distributed over the internet. In this paper, we describe selected current and planned uses of OWL-DL, related tools, and our deployment. We describe some successes and limitations we have found to date using OWLbased technologies, especially tool support. We also indicate the important components we require from a robust technical infrastructure as we move forward with expanding the functionality of the frameworks. This expansion includes additional semantic representation and reasoning/query services as well as broadening the scope of our scientific disciplines.