Impacts of MMI Ontology Registry and Repository (mmisw) losing hosting privilege's on IOOS metadata profile

[MathewBiddle]

From John Graybeal via ESIP #cor slack channel:

A heads up to everyone in the COR community. The creators of the COR software have another site, mmisw.org, that performs similar services as COR, but for marine science. We are about to lose our hosting privileges from TAMU-CC, who have been graciously hosting this information for a long time (thank you Felimon Gayanilo!) but can no longer do so.

We will have to do this rather quickly, so we can't really wait for a SemTech call to move forward. Our current plan is to migrate the marine ontologies and their user accounts to the COR (since they are earth science based), and forward the domain lookups so the terms continue to be resolvable. So:

1. If you have experience you'd like to donate, please contact me.
2. If you have questions or concerns about the above, please post to the list so that we can discuss them.

What might the impacts be on the IOOS Metadata Profile if the IOOS terms were not ported?

From @mwengren:

The only one I know of that we're dependent on in the IOOS 1.2 Profile is sector: https://mmisw.org/ont/ioos/sector. This is referenced in the creator_sector attribute, which is required.

...we'd need to understand downstream impacts if we dropped/changed it.

I believe it's required only because it's in the IOOS SOS/SWE standards and previous versions of the IOOS profile (IOOS 1.1) and we wanted some backwards compatibility, but I could be wrong about that. ncSOS code probably depended on creator_sector presence in netCDF files to generate the SOS XML files that are compliant with our SOS guidance.

If we had to migrate any vocabularies over to the ESIP COR, sector would be the one. We also mention platform: https://mmisw.org/ont/ioos/platform in IOOS 1.2 in the platform_vocabulary attribute, but those can be sourced from NERC as well.

Tagging @fgayanilo, if you have any additional insights.

[MathewBiddle]

I chatted with John Graybeal about the IOOS ontologies in mmisw. They recommend porting the IOOS stuff over, if only for historical reasons. So, they have decided to migrate it to a new host.

Which means we don't need to take action at this moment. However, the IOOS community should evaluate this resource and identify if it is something we should contribute to or move away from. Not sure where to start that conversation.

[MathewBiddle]

I searched NVS for sector (among a variety of variations) and couldn't find a similar vocabulary.

I wonder, if the sector vocab is a useful enough resource, should we have a conversation with the BODC/NERC folks to see if we can incorporate it into the NVS?