Marine Planning and Service Platform (MAPS): An Advanced Research Engine for Grey Literature in Marine Science

The MAPS (Marine Planning and Service Platform) project is a development of the Marine project (Ricerca Industriale e Sviluppo Sperimentale Regione Liguria 2007-2013) aiming at building a computer platform for supporting Operative Oceanography in its activities. One of the main objective of the project is to develop a repository that should gather, classify and structure marine scientific literature and data thus guaranteeing their accessibility to researchers and institutions by means of standard protocols. Community and Requirements. Operative Oceanography is the branch of marine research which deals with the development of integrated systems for examining and modeling the ocean monitoring and forecast. Experts need access to real-time data on the state of the sea such as forecasts on temperatures, streams, tides and the relevant scientific literature. This finds application in many areas, ranging from civilian and military safety to protection of off-shore and coastal infrastructures. The metadata. The set of metadata associated with marine data is defined in the CDI (Common Data Index) documented standard. They encode: the types of sizes which have been measured; the measurement tools the platform which has been employed; the geographic area where measures have been taken; the environmental matrix; the descriptive documentation. As concerns the scientific documentation, at the current stage of the CDI standard, a document is shaped around the following metadata: Title, Authors, Version, ISBN/DOI, Topic, Date of publication, Body/Institution, Abstract. The search engine. The query system (which is actually under development) has been designed for operating with structured data - the metadata - and raw data - the associated technical and scientific documentation. Full-text technologies are often unsuccessful when applied to this type of queries since they assume the presence of specific keywords in the text; in order to fix this problem, the MAPS project suggests to use different emantic technologies for retrieving the text and data and thus getting much more complying results. In the Poster we will present the scenario of the Operative Oceanography together with the technologies used to develop an advanced earch engine which aims at providing rapid and efficient access to a Digital Library of oceanographic data. The case-study is also highlighting how the retrieval of grey literature from this specific marine community could be reproduced for similar communities as well, thus revealing the 2 great impact that the processing, re-use as well as application of grey data have on societal needs/problems and their answers.