Many collections of scienti c data in particular disciplines are available today around the world. Much of this data conforms to some agreed upon standard for data exchange, i.e., a standard schema and its semantics. However, sharing this data among a global community of users is still di cult because of a lack of standards for the following necessary functions: (i) data providers need a standard for describing or publishing available sources of data (ii) data administrators need a standard for discovering the published data and (iii) users need a standard for accessing this discovered data. This paper describes a prototype implementation of a system, WebSemantics, that accomplishes the above tasks. We describe an architecture and protocols for the publication, discovery and access to scienti c data. We de ne a language for discovering sources and querying the data in these sources, and we provide a formal semantics for this language.
George A. Mihaila, Louiqa Raschid, Anthony Tomasic