Web 2.0 and Semantic Web Portal for Annotation and Discovery of Web Services in Geosciences

With the rapid development of e-Science and scientific workflow technologies, geosciences Web portals are becoming even more important to support geoscientists in their research and discovery. While existing portals provide convenient means for humans to share and search for scientific data and services, they provide little support for automated agents like scientific workflow management systems. A pilot project, called GEO-SEED, addresses this drawback and supports both human and machine friendly interfaces for Web services annotation and discovery in geosciences. The architecture of the portal blends Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, featuring an intuitive and collaborative work environment of a structured wiki and machine-interpretable metadata accessible via standard RDF, OWL, and SPARQL languages.