Advanced Campus Services
Information Systems & Technology
Georgia State University
P. O. Box 3968
Atlanta, Georgia 30302-3968
Phone +1 404 463 9685
Email: avandenberg@gsu.edu
Information Integration Lab at Georgia State Promoting Semantic Interoperability of Metadata for Directories of the future (This work is funded by NSF-ITR Award 0312636, September 2003-August 2006)
Directories provide a well-defined, general mechanism for describing enterprise resources within an organization and enabling their discovery by individuals and applications. The research investigates an alternative to current approaches to interoperability of directory metadata, based on the proposition that monitoring, clustering, and appropriate visualization of cross-organizational metadata can help identify patterns of practice, promote and facilitate the reuse of such metadata, and so lead to automatic, dynamic evolution of standards. An initial prototype has been implemented and clustering of directory objects based on their metadata has been demonstrated. Deployment of web-based version is underway with a database of LDAP schemas being compiled. Research into reference sets and development of Word Net-like concepts for LDAP is underway. Presentations have been made at Internet2 and other conferences.
Our research group has built a Semantic Facilitator (TM) (SM) to display directory objects in a clustered and meaningful way. The prototype includes a user interface, mechanisms to process directory schema create/change requests and extract that directory metadata, a process to extract LDAP schema information and apply an SOM clustering algorithm, and redisplay of the resulting cluster maps to the user interface. The project involves running a clustering algorithm that potentially would cluster large sets of data from multiple directories, so there is also interest in how GRID based resources may permit the Semantic Facilitator (TM) (SM) to operate more efficiently by use of distributed resources.
