I'm pleased to be introducing Maria Stoika, who's going to give the seminar today on the scientific variables ontology for the webinar. And I first hired Maria to work with me at CU back in, it was end of December, or December, 2015. And she was one of several candidates, but by far the best applicant for this position, overqualified, but she has a PhD in environmental, energy environmental and chemical engineering, but she had an interest in doing scientific programming type of work and had taken lots of Coursera courses that were very impressive. And so she was a good fit for this position. And ever since we've been working together and she's been on several EarthCube projects with me and one DARPA project, continuing to work mostly on that scientific variables ontology. And for those of you, she'll explain this, I'm sure, but this started with work on the CSDMS standard names that I initiated some time ago. And we wanted to formalize that into an official ontology that was more compatible with state-of-the-art ways of doing ontologies. And so that's what she's been doing for these number of years, mostly. And it's been fantastic. It's been really great working with her. And in 2018, she was promoted to research associate so she can start bringing in grants on her own if she so chooses. And then she's also was asked, which is kind of an honor. She was asked to co-chair the Research Data Alliance Iadopt working group, which has taken some of the ideas from the scientific variables ontology into their ontology. So they've been inspired by our work to try to describe variables and that's being used by them. And so without further ado, I will let Maria take over. Thank you so much, Scott. And thank you so much CSDMS for having me present our work on SVO. I was going to say, I think Scott was breaking up for me during the introduction a little bit. So I wanted to wave and say hi so you all can see what I look like, but I will turn my video off just because I wanna make sure that you can hear what I'm saying because that's more important than my face. So without further ado, let me share my screen. All right. So you can see I did a very quick, simple edit to the title of the talk today. And that was because the original title was supposed to be a simple introduction to the scientific variables ontology, but I decided the word gentle was a little bit more appropriate. And that's because as you'll see, SVO is a solution to quite a complex problem in many ways. And so SVO is not really simple because it can't really be. It's a very complex problem. However, I'm going to make this a very gentle introduction. I will try not to go too much into the technical details or spend too much time on very ontological definitions. And I'll try to do as many examples, concrete examples that hopefully you all can relate to. So yeah, so let's get started. So a little bit of background, if you're affiliated with CSDMS, it's very likely that you do computational work in the sciences. And you're familiar with the fact that computational work in the sciences requires electronic resources such as data and models. Have inputs and outputs. And some of those inputs can come from data sets while others may come directly from the outputs of other models. And this information that is exchanged between these resources that we're interested in are the scientific variables. And in this presentation, I'm going to focus on how do we know that these scientific variables that are passed between data sets and models, how do we know what they really are? What are the concepts that these scientific variables represent? So I will not be focusing on how these variables are collected or how they're stored, what the format of files is or what the structure of those files is. We're purely interested in the concepts represented by the scientific variables. And the problem of interoperability that arises is from this question of how do you know if a resource is appropriate to use as an input to a model? And conversely, if you've created a resource and you want to share it with others, how do others know that your resource might be the resource that they need? And so metadata provides a good solution to this. And in case you're not familiar with metadata, metadata is everywhere on the internet. And you can think of metadata as tags that are attached to your electronic resources. They may be embedded inside of the resource or external to the resource. And these tags may contain different types of labels that can essentially summarize what is contained inside your resource. And this summary can be used by search engines such as Google or it can just be used internally in databases or in repositories to index your resources and make them findable. And metadata is great. Well, in some ways, metadata is great. But metadata is not always structured. So sometimes metadata can be found in freeform text. Or, alternately, it may not follow a common set of representation principles across resources. So if a resource, say, uses a standard to represent a scientific variable, it may not be the same standard that another resource may use. So you might be thinking to yourself, well, that means we need a common language for representing scientific variables. Or we could call this a standard. We need a standard that is the mother of all scientific variable standards, right? And in the earth sciences, we do have a lot of standards or, if not necessarily, standards just lists of variables to pick from. So you might be familiar with the USGS NWIS parameter codes or the climate and forecasting standard names. You also have the CSDMS standard names built right here in-house. You also have NASA suite ontologies, the GCMD keywords. And so many more. I'm just popping up here the ones that I'm most familiar with, but I'm sure you know many others. So, and this brings up a really nice quote that I like that has a little bit of humor to it, which is that the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. And the reason this is funny is because the whole point of a standard is that there should really only be one, right? And we should all be able to agree on a standard and all use that one standard. But it's hard for different groups to agree because different groups might need their standards to do different things or to have different functionalities. What I also thought was funny in context of this presentation with this quote is that it was attributed to Grace Hopper or to Andrew Tenenbaum or to a list of other possible attributes. And so even in this quote, people could not agree as to who actually said it. And so what I'm going to be talking to you about today is SVO, which is not, its intent is not to be a standard, which is the mother of all standards. Instead, what it's, what SVO is intended to be is a common language for computers to try to read scientific variables in all different kinds of forms and try to understand what is, what is the intended scientific variable that is being described. And so SVO is developed as a child, if you will, of the CSDMS standard names. And this work was very lengthy and detailed and important and it really highlighted the fact that there are essential components of scientific variables that are common to most standards and that some standards may be missing some components that are essential. Some standards may have extraneous components that are not domain independent and that are maybe not found across a lot of standards. But there are some core concepts with regards to scientific variables that occur or implied again and again and again. And this is what SVO tries to tackle. So SVO encodes these core components in a way that machines can understand. They can say, oh, okay, you're telling me that you're talking about a scientific variable. So I'm going to look for these components because I know that human scientists refer to these components when they're mentioning scientific variables. And so what is SVO exactly? And I tried to distill it down to a couple of sentences but there really are quite a few components to SVO itself. But overall, we think of SVO as a framework for representing scientific variables in a machine readable form. And it's particularly useful in automating computational scientific workflows. And this framework enables what we call modular, principled expression manipulation and creation of scientific variable concepts. And so the components of SVO that allow all this functionality are outlined here. And the first one is an upper ontology which essentially just defines a set of elementary concept categories. Some might use the term atomistic and some of these primary ones are the property, the phenomenon, or the process. And these are used to build complex scientific variables. So these concept categories, you can think of them as ways to classify your terminology. And secondly, there are also a set of design patterns that allow you to combine these elementary or atomistic classes to create more complex concepts and thus also more complex variables. And because the design patterns are reduced to be a simple set of design patterns, just it's under 10 design patterns that you can use to represent the different components and combinations in scientific variables with SVO, that can turn out to create quite bulky representations of variables. And so what we've also introduced is a set of rules that can be used to infer relationships between atomistic components that might be chained together across multiple relationships. And this can be used to condense down the representation to a simpler representation which will result in more diverse relationships between entities. But it allows the simpler representation that is more easily searchable. We also have an extensible lower ontology that contains the domain-specific instances of the classes defined in the upper ontology. And so one thing, you can think of this as basically just the terminology that you're using to define your variables. And one thing that I want to emphasize here is that SVO does not consider itself an authority in what terms you should use. And we do currently encourage pointing to external resources that define these instances in the lower ontology. We prefer to use Wikipedia and Wikidata because it can be editable by anyone. But you could also, of course, link to official ontologies. And we do allow creating a stub or a placeholder if you are not able to find a definition in an external ontology. But again, we do not define that term for you. And lastly, we have three tools that you can use with SVO. The first is to search for existing variables that are already represented in the ontology. So we have indexed a lot of the climate and forecasting variables as well as the CSDMS standard names and the NWES parameter codes into SVO forms. So those are available for you to search. We also have a tool for comparing the existing variables that are represented and determining whether they are similar and in what ways they might differ. And we're also working on a tool for guided creation of new variables from freeform text. So I'm just going to dive right in. I don't want to spend too much time on the nitty-gritty details. I'm just going to dive right in on the major SVO design patterns and the first one, which is probably the most important one, which is derived from the CSDMS standard names, is this idea that any scientific variable should be able to be decomposed into two distinct components. The first is the object of observation, which we call the phenomenon, and the second is the property, which inheres in that phenomenon. And in addition, when you have a quantitative property, that property may be defined with respect to a reference, and in that situation, the reference is required as well. So diving deeper into these two core components, the phenomenon and the property, there are in essence two types of phenomena, but the phenomenon at large is a four dimensional entity. So it has spatial aspects and temporal aspects, but a static phenomenon, which can be thought of as an object or a body. Here I've put up the very ontological definition, which we're not going to get into the details of that, but it's official definition as an independent concrete entity, which can be or is observed to exist or happen. Here I'm essentially just showing the design pattern for what you can think of as an object or a body, which is a static phenomenon, which does not necessarily involve a process, but to which you can attach different attributes so you can specify it at a highly granular level. And an attribute is simply a property value pair, and we do also provide some shorthand notation for the certain attributes that occur again and again and again, such as form, matter, role, and parts. We are going to give some examples, so don't worry too much about what each of these is. And now, as I mentioned before, there are also dynamic phenomena. So these are phenomena that involve processes. And for phenomena that involve processes, the design pattern is a bit different and it involves what we call participants, which are other phenomena. So again, these may be objects or more complex phenomena. And these participants, as they participate in the process, this process may also have a trajectory. So going to the property, the property is a characteristic of the object of interest of the scientific variable. And one of the things about the property is that its existence is not independent. Its existence depends on the phenomenon that it inheres in. And so here you can see some of the relationships between a property and some of the other entities in the ontology. And for quantitative properties, we know that a quantitative property may have dimensions. Quantitative property may also be operated on by some mathematical operation or transformation. It may also have a property type, and this means things like if it's a vector or a scalar. And in addition to this, a property may also pertain to what we call an abstraction, but you can think of this as a mathematical model for a phenomenon. And in that context, a property may also have a property role, such as being an exponent or a parameter. So here we're going to look at some examples. We've talked a lot about the theoretical, but what are some examples of scientific variables? Well, they can be very simple. You could have something like the height of a tree or the shape of an organism. Or you could have the solubility of carbon dioxide in water, where you have two target phenomena that you're looking at. You could be looking at the low level of chemical oxygen demand in unfiltered water. Or something more complex, like the time integral of the volume flux of water infiltrating the soil surface. Or lastly, you can have this very complicated one that I will not read. But I hope that you can see, as I've been talking about these different components of a scientific variable, that no matter how complex, if you study these descriptions enough, you can see that you can actually divide these descriptions into an object of interest and a corresponding property. So here are some examples of an object of interest. Again, we start with the simpler ones. And we build our way up to much more complicated ones. And we have phenomena that are static. So they're just like we can think of them as objects or bodies. And we have phenomena that involve processes. So they're dynamic. And we also have phenomena that include a lot of other information, such as context. And here are some examples of properties. We have qualitative properties such as shape, quantitative vector properties such as velocity. Properties that may be properties between two different objects, such as the sun and the moon. Sorry, the earth and the moon. We have electrical conductivity, molar concentration, which is the property of some entity and another entity. And we have coverage severity code, which is a sort of, you could think of it as a pseudo quantification of a qualitative property. We can have properties that are transformed by mathematical operations. But all in all, these are all properties. Here I'm showing just a few examples, one from CSCMS, one from the CF standard names and one from CSCMS. And here are some examples of how they're decomposed into their corresponding objective interests or phenomenon and property. And here are some examples of when you have a specific distinct phenomenon, how you could decompose it into its attributes to describe it. So here, for example, you have filtered water, the form is grain and the matter is sand or the bottom of the atmosphere. Furthermore, here, the previous, the ones that I showed on the previous slide were what we call bodies or objects or static phenomena. On this page, I'm showing dynamic phenomena. So these are phenomena that, for example, involve the motion of the earth or turning of fresh water or collection of a bed sediment sample. But again, these can also be decomposed into participants and the corresponding processes. Here, I'm showing some examples of properties and how properties can be decomposed. And the second two here, you can see that there are mathematical operations that act on the corpus. The first one is an interesting example of a property that is associated with a mathematical model of a phenomenon, the Flint law, and that also has a property role in that phenomenon, which is that it is the exponent. So you might remember that I mentioned that for some variables, there may also be a reference to the scientific variables. There may also be a reference required, which is a basis or standard for evaluating the value of the scientific variable. And we do provide a design pattern for decomposing this reference. However, again, just as with everything that I've covered so far, not every decomposition needs to be made. The more decomposition that you can make, the easier it is to understand what the variable is. But in some cases, it may be too tedious to expand this out. And so ultimately, some things may not be expanded out. I also mentioned that some phenomena are complex and you may want to include extra context for the phenomenon of interest. And so this is a design pattern to provide that context. And we'll go over some examples right here on this slide. So here you can see, for example, we might be talking about carbon dioxide from anthropogenic emission. And so the anthropogenic emission is the context in that case. You might be interested in some properties of soil that is five feet below the land surface. And in that case, a five feet below the land surface is the context. In this other more complicated example of the oil slick, you have two contexts that are provided, one that it's onshore and one that it's within 25 feet of the bed sediment sample collection. We also have a participant design pattern, which you might remember that I mentioned when I was talking about phenomena that involve processes. And so when we have a process, it might be necessary to identify for the participant phenomena what their roles are in that process. In addition to that, the participant design pattern also allows us to assign what we call variable roles. And this can help us deduce how a particular phenomenon is used to evaluate the property that's identified in a scientific variable. So if the property refers to multiple phenomena, such as a solute and a solvent, the variable role could help us determine which phenomenon pre-switchable. Here we have some examples of phenomena involving processes and how they might have multiple participants and each participant has a participant role. And again, just because you identify a participant, you do not need to identify a participant role that should really only be identified if it is deemed critical to the scientific variable. And lastly, I just wanted to show you this is really simple. I'm not sure that you could even call it a design pattern. This is just a relationship between a phenomenon and an abstraction. And so this is just a mathematical representation of a phenomenon. And this is just how you would link the two together. And so some examples of this would be that, for example, the temporal decay of aftershocks in a seismic sequence has a mathematical abstraction called the Modified Amory Law where the initiation of motion of sediment in a fluid flow can be described by Schild's formula. And here I also put that the Schild's parameter is the critical parameter in the Schild's formula. And so you can see how that links circularly since the Schild's parameter is a property that is associated with this mathematical model. So we're getting to the end of the presentation. And I just wanted to pop on here our most commonly asked question, which is, this is complicated. And the answer is it is. It really is. I mean, it's a complicated problem. And that is why there are so many standards and so many people out there trying to decide, you know, what's the best way to describe these scientific variables in a way that machines can understand. And I do think that SVO is a great tool for doing this. And we are aiming to automate as much of this process that I've been talking about as possible so that you, as a scientist, do not have to worry about it. It is good to have a basic understanding of what SVO is trying to do because with the automation process, there might be issues in the translation, might have to make corrections. So it's good to understand what's going on under the hood. But that is what we're trying to get to. And in the meantime, what I hope you're getting from this presentation mostly is that it's not so much that we're pushing that it's necessary for you to completely decompose a scientific variable representation down to its very atomistic components. But that I've gotten across the importance of understanding that there are these core components of a scientific variable. So when you do label your resource, if you want to make it accessible to others, I think it's very important to make sure that you're identifying your objective interest of your scientific variable, that you're identifying your property, that if there is a reference for evaluating that property, that you're representing this. Any context that might be important for, you deem important for identifying the scientific variable, that should be identified as well. In the meantime, I do encourage you to check out our new website. We're still updating it, but we have some new content up there. I'm also sharing the GitHub of where the web, because we have this hosted off of GitHub pages. Just in case you want to check that, that would be an easy way to follow when we do make updates to the website. Also, don't hesitate to email us with questions. And in conclusion, I just wanted to say that I think I'm very grateful that Scott gave me the opportunity to work on this project. And I think that SVO has a really good potential for becoming a very powerful language for understanding scientific variables from the perspective of a machine who's trying to read it and is trying to understand resources and make them available to scientists. So with that, thank you for listening to my talk. And I'll take any questions if there aren't. Do I, I see that Leslie has her hand up. How do I, I figured I saw that I finally read the pop-up and understood that I could unmute myself. Hello, Maria. Hi, Leslie. Thanks very much for that gentle introduction. I think you met your goal. Of course I still have questions, but at least I've now seen the overview. And my question is after many years, I can kind of, like if I see a CSDMS standard name, I can kind of look at it and I see the syntax. And I'm like, I think that's a CSDMS standard name. Now with everything you've explained, if I see a scientific variable and how it's actually expressed in plain text, like would I be able to know this is a CSDMS standard name versus a scientific variable, which is richer? Like, could you just explain that a little bit? Yeah, so that is a great question. How are the CSDMS standard names linked to SVO? So, so the CSDMS standard names are essentially strings. They have a chosen vocabulary and they follow the pattern of SVO. So on the back end, SVO and CSDMS are built on the same theory, which is that you decompose a variable in these two components and then each component is further decomposed. The differences that CSDMS standard name is, as I mentioned, it's a string. So you're chaining together these different terms that here, for example, in this last slide that I have that I'm still sharing, you can see how this variable has been decomposed into what we call atomistic components. So an SVO representation of a scientific variable would be this machine-readable cluster or bundle of information and relationships between entities. It would never really be something that you as a user look at. What I would do is that this would be stored as some data structure inside of a computer. And then I would have a translation mechanism that would take these individual atomistic components and it would string them together in a specific sequence based on where they are in this structure that I'm showing on the screen. Does that answer your question? Thank you, host, and sorry for muting myself. Okay, so I unmuted. It does answer my question except, it's complicated. It's a struct, a data structure. I don't know, like I may not be able to look at it as plain text, but then when it's string together, when it's like interpreted and then string together, do I have to know this is a scientific variable from SVO, not a CSDMS standard name, or should I just not think about that? I think you should not think about that. I think what's important for you is to know, is this the scientific variable that describes whatever I'm trying to label? Yeah. Yeah, so this is more the back end. This is so that the computer knows what that scientific variable name stands for. Thank you very much. I'm a very, I can only think of concrete things. So thank you for your explanation. Are there any final questions? This is Scott. I thought I would just add that one way to think about this is this representation is it, I think of it as an RDF bundle. With all this extra detail. But you can serialize that you can, you can make some rule as Maria said to sort of go from that. To just a string that has these parts. And we had a way to do that was with the CSDMS standard names that use different characters like double underscores and Tilda's and, and other symbols hyphens to be able to sort of serialize that. That was one proposed way to do it. But it wasn't possible to infer everything from that string that is captured in this bundle. This bundle is much more rich in terms of describing what, what actually is going on. So you kind of want both. You'd want the machine representation, but you'd also want some kind of a handy string. The human condition reading sort of hopefully say, yeah, that's my variable. And I'd also add a big part of this is disambiguation. There's in science, there's often concepts that are very closely related, but they're not the same thing. And a lot of problems with machine with interaction between resources is people are not specific about what they mean. There's lots of examples like. If you think of heat capacity, if you've got a thermal dynamics class, they have four or five, six different concepts of heat capacity, whether it's isobaric or isochoric or isothermal, and whether it's mass specific or volume specific. So all that has to be captured to fully disambiguate the concept of heat capacity. And that disambiguation until you, until you're sure there's nothing to conflict with, like rain rate, what kind of rain rate is it a volume flux and mass flux. There's lots of ways to talk about rain rates. So which one are you talking about exactly in this resource? So that I just, just throw that out there and hopefully that makes it a little bit more clear. And it looks like there's a question in the chat. Have you by chance represented many of the NWIS parameter codes already as an exercise? Yes. So that was done about, I want to say, two and a half or three years ago is the last time that we pulled the NWIS parameter codes. I said NWIS parameter codes, but there's also something that's called the SRS names, which are closely related to the NWIS parameter codes. And that's actually what we pulled up. But that was several years ago, and I know that they're populating it with more. We don't have some new ones, but we did do the ones that were available about. Three years ago, I want to say. Yeah, and actually that oil slick example that I had provided, it was from that list. Yeah, this is Scott again. One of the reasons for tackling NWIS in the CF convention standard aims early on was to, to make sure that we had a rich collection of existing names that had been already been identified as important. And just using this test cases for, for whether our system could represent all of those. And so both of those standard name collections has a pretty large collection of things. And they're in different contexts. The NWIS stuff is mostly aquatic chemistry, which is more than that. And the CF is mostly climate forecasting variables with the atmosphere and ocean, but they're both large. And so by, by showing that we could take every one of those names and represent it like this was a test that we had enough breadth to, to do whatever might come along. Oh, Risa. Would you like to ask a question? Am I saying the name right? Okay. I didn't know I could unmute myself. Okay. I guess what I'm, I guess what I'm wondering is maybe I'm, I'm not thinking about like the level, the level of this correctly, but like how flexible is it for, for example, for a scientist to, or scientists to, you know, want to like redefine a certain, a certain part of, of something that's going to change other things. Like, like, like a relation, like redefine a relationship. And then that's going to affect how something else is, is defined. But I mean, this is all based on definition anyway. So how, like, where does this stand as a standard in the hierarchy of scientific, you know, practice? Yeah, so that's a really great question. So again, I, SVO does not aim to be a standard. However, what we try to do, and I think if I'm answering, if I'm understanding your question correctly, I think you can see, for example, I have this example up on the screen right now that I think you can see. Because we have this saved as a kind of a bundle data structure. It actually is very flexible in changing. For example, you could just take this representation and you could go from, say this Brachionis organism to a different type of organism. And you would have the exact same representation. And it's just that you would change the genus of the organism that you're talking about. And so having this kind of representation does allow us to swap things and then to insert new design patterns. And we do think that this is very helpful and it's very useful as opposed to a standard name where, you know, you would have to have a group of people coming together and deciding, you know, always this standard name sufficient or do we have to change, you know, and having kind of a discussion about it. So we do believe that this is more flexible in that respect and making small changes. Okay. Thank you. This is Scott again. I'm sorry I keep jumping in, but I keep having thoughts I want to share triggered by these questions. For those of you that haven't ever thought about ontologies before, which included me a few years ago. This diagram in these has all these words to start with has, that's not something we made up. This is following a, some very well established established web standards like the RDF standard from the W3C group and things like SCOS and owl. So there's a, there's a, there are technology standards and ways that are used widely across the internet behind the scenes for representing things about the toaster you might want to buy or, or something you want an airline flight or whatever. And they use exactly these kinds of diagrams under the hood to organize that metadata. But to do it for a new, for whatever area you're thinking about, you need to develop the ontology for that class of things. So, so when you do a faceted search for the best flight, or when you do a faceted search online for the best item you want to buy. Under the hood, there are representations like this, they're allowing the machine to, to help understand what you're looking for and to present things to you in a way that's useful to you. So this is all following very well established standards. We can make up the standards. We're just, we're making the standard names conform to those standards is a way to think about it. Mark. Hey, thanks for the talk. I just wanted to mention something that resonated with me that you just said is like making standard names is kind of hard. I know that I struggled with that over the years and I, I bugged Scott, I bugged you, I bugged Eric.  And you don't have to have a committee of people sitting around trying to figure out how to construct the standard name. So I just wanted to say that I like that. I like that exact explanation you gave. Thank you. And Leslie, I think. Hi, thanks. I was trying to type it, but I'm a very slow thinker and typer. Okay. This is related to what Mark was just saying. I was wondering if there was an example from a CSDMS model usage in standard name where that standard name was kind of ambiguous. And like, it wasn't enough to describe it all the way so that this concept helped to describe the variable or concept more fully. Yeah, so I think I'm just pulling this off the top of my head. So this is not a super concrete example, but I'm pretty sure this is kind of close. So I believe there were two names that were overlapping. That were one of them was referring to groundwater. And the other one was referring to water. Like in the ground but below the land surface or something like that. It was essentially two things that were referring, both were referring to groundwater. But one was referring to groundwater in terms of. The water being like in the ground. And the other one was referring to it as being water under the land surface. And when we decomposed it this way, what we found was that essentially the water under the land surface, the land surface provides a context. And it being in the ground provides a different context, but they are not contradictory contexts. And so those two names would actually be compatible with each other, but they're just slightly different representations of the same concept, the same scientific variable. Is that does that kind of answer your question that totally answers my question and gives me a concrete example to think of if what, if what I understand of like. Groundwater with a capital G versus just like water under the surface of the earth. That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. This got again, just adding a couple of my favorite examples like some, we learned early on the some. Properties of things involve a pair of objects. And those objects have some relationship to each other. So for instance, a friction factor. Has to talk about two things that are in contact like pavement and rubber. And it's only when you have the two. Participants pavement and rubber identified that, that you haven't been a friction factor defined for those two things. It's impossible to really represent that context. In just a string, you know, it might be sort of intuited from reading the string that if I say concrete rubber friction factor. You might understand that the concrete rubber have to be touching that that's part of the idea, but that touching context is not really clear from the string. Another example is anytime you have a medium where you have one thing in another, like when molten metals mixed together, there's miscibility and there's solubility for things in water or whatever, or there's water in soil. So whenever there's something in something else like a medium or carbon dioxide and water, you can't, you can't fully capture that containment context. Unless you have classes like this, we tried to do it with the order in which the object part, things were represented. So it kind of was a drill down mechanism, but it really wasn't fully adequate for, for those kinds of things. And another one is, is if you, the earth and the moon have a special relationship to each other. And if you want to talk about things involving the two of them together, like the gravitational pull of, you know, the moon on the earth or vice versa. Those are two things that are interacting in the form of unit, but they're not touching and they're not contained. There's no containment and there's no touching, but there's this, still this connection through gravity between these two things. So that the context is really important to try to say, well, how do these two or more objects relate to each other? Is one inside the other? Is one touching the other? Is one pulling on the other? So I think of it a lot like that. Are there any final questions or comments? I have kind of a question for Maria. When you talk about references, we didn't elaborate too much on that, but does that include like, when I think of that, I think about there are certain properties that are only defined if you introduce a mathematical model first. Like if you want to talk about landscape profile curvature, there's an implicit assumption that you can do two derivatives of the landscape, but the landscape is really a not a smooth mathematical surface. So you have to introduce this construct of a twice differentiable surface as a model for the landscape before that becomes defined or for the earth, you have to introduce the concept of an ellipsoid before the semi major axis of the earth is defined, or you have to introduce the concept of a black body before you can talk about the black body temperature of the earth. And so there's these abstractions that you, that are often mathematical or physical like the black body example, but you have to put in place first before the quantity you want to talk about is really defined. Is that the, is that properly handled by the reference category? I think for the ellipsoids, that is more in the abstraction realm. So in that class of category, the reference is more for things like, like specifically quantities that are used to provide, I'm sorry if I don't say this exactly right. They're used to provide a reference point for the measurement of some value of a scientific variable. So for example, altitude is measured with respect to the earth's surface, let's say, or yeah, so things like that. So it's for a concrete quantity. Whereas what you're saying with the ellipsoid and applying a model that would be in the abstraction class, and you could definitely, these are things that are not 100% worked out in SVO at the moment, but I could see how you could link a reference to an abstraction in the sense that a reference would be associated with an abstraction. Yeah. Another one is datums like the mean seeds, which you can define by mean seed level or by other means, but in that case, you're defining a reference of where seed level is. Yeah. Shaped planet or whatever. And but there are more than one, there's more than one way to define a datum or an ellipsoid. Another example I like is a river centerline. Like if you're going to talk about the sinuosity of a river, you have to impose some concept of a centerline, but there really isn't a well-defined centerline to a river. So you have to lay this mathematical concept into the, into that situation before that concept of sinuosity really makes full sense. An abstract abstraction that you said. Well, I think we're getting close to the top of the hour. Thank you so much, Maria and Scott for providing the webinar. We really do appreciate it. And thank you everybody for joining us. We'll go ahead and send you the link to the presentation. It's been recorded and please feel free to circulate it with any colleagues that you think may also benefit from it. Thank you so much.


We're here to what Tan? Anyway just in case you didn't know or maybe you aren't aware the Donegal Fla is coming to Let It Kenny this year and it kicks off from 6th May to the 8th of May and I'm delighted. I'm joined by Majella, Shannon, Saisha and our very own Gene Corn. Good evening to you all. Good evening to you Paul. It's strange to be on this side. I know why. Are you nervous now? I'm a bit nervous. I never know what you are going to say to me. At least when I'm on that side of the desk I know what I'm going to ask and I know what you're going to ask. Come here you're all very welcome. Gene you're the chair of the cultists. That's right I'm the chair of the Donegal Fla.  Of course and we'll pass on our applause to Joseph and his family at this time. Now tell me this. We'll talk to Majella, you're the secretary. Tell us a bit about your role in this. Well I'm the secretary. I'm taking care of all the entries for the competitions. Okay. And anybody who needs to enter the competitions will follow them to me. Yeah. And does it keep you busy? It does yes. Too busy maybe at times? Sometimes yes. Very good. And we'll just move on Shannon, your role. Yeah so I'm the PRO of the cultists and just you know promoting the music and Get everybody aware? Yeah just letting everyone aware of what's going on and how to like access your music and stuff really. Great. Right we're going to talk more so don't be thinking as I said. Saoirse your role in this. Yes I am the Irish officer so maybe try and promote a bit more Gileaga around Latterkenne. Very good, very good. And is that difficult to do? Are you translating or are you just writing on your own accord? Well I was translating a few letters here and there and a few things like that. So we're trying to bring Irish more into Latterkenne. I know they're letting you can and do a lot of work already but it's just trying to get more people speaking it within Latterkenne. Of course well done. Right we're going to go straight to a piece of music first on if you still mind. So first up what have you got? The first tune is the Stone of Destiny. Right. And then that's going into a really called The Holly Bush. It was composed by Finn Bardwire. Very good. And you're ready? It's all about plenty of good music and Maria McCormick says mighty playing, mighty playing it is so well done. So tell us the series of events that are happening and so it's kicking off on the 6th. What's the program? Well on the 6th we're going to have a Keely out in the Bonnegee Hall. Okay. I think that's tradition that there's a Keely always the first night of the flat and it's a fear Keely and a two hand and from what I gather it has to be very specific or people might be disappointed. So that kicks off about nine o'clock and there'll be tea and sandwiches and Martin Duggan Tory sound he is playing for us at the Keely. Oh very good. And then on the Saturday then's the competitions and they're going to be held out in the LYAT or the Atlantic Technological University as it's going to be called and that's a new name for you. That's a new name yeah they've got university status now yeah so very excellent so that kicks off about 10 o'clock in the morning until about six so it's great that all the competitions are in the one venue rather than you know parents with children going from one venue to another venue. So that's on the Saturday and then on the Sunday then we have a marching bands competition in the town park and a family fun day as well for all the family so we're just praying now for good weather for that. Well as the event in the LYAT is it indoors? It's indoors yeah it's indoors yeah that's for the competition. And Sunday's the big day with the parade? No it's not a parade. A marching bands competition. So what we envisage is that the competition will be held in the town park and then that we'll have a parade then afterwards maybe down the high road and down the main street. Ah very good. And of course there'll be a lot of pop-up sessions around the town as well all over the fly not only in pubs but maybe in restaurants or outside as well. So when's the last time the flower was in Lerner Kelly? A long long time ago long before my time had been involved in it but the last Donegal flower was back in 2019 in Moville and it was planned then for Carandona but then Covid then put an end to that so there hasn't been a flower now for two years and I suppose with all the ups and downs of Covid and the Omicron very until last December the County AGM many of the branches in Donegal were reluctant to hold the flower because you know it could be on could be off. So Joseph our vice chair decided it that it's Fagerland that we'll go for it and hope for the best so all things fingers crossed I think that we're on the other side of the tunnel liar and we'll have it alive. Is there a lot of work involved in it? A lot of work involved. Now Joe is the driving force behind this and it's unfortunate that he's very persuasive. He is like he really is he's so energetic and he has such wonderful ideas and he's trying to see outside the box this year that you know that to bring in families to bring in other things that are just not completely tied to music and it's it has energies fabulous and of course Majella the secretary always think the chair is the easy when you just chair the meetings but Majella has all the correspondents and entries to deal with so she is very busy. Well done Majella. But come here is there is there a possibility getting the national one? Well that's what we're hoping for I said maybe our branch are seeing this as a trial run and maybe showing the businesses of Letter Kenny just how much the flower could bring to the town and I suppose like Letter Kenny is it's a great town there's so many businesses restaurants bars shops and it's a great occasion for Letter Kenny to showcase what it has to offer and the flower was here back in 2005 and 2006 and I think the people of the town didn't realize just exactly what it would bring to the town and I suppose in the last what 17 years I think the flower has grown it's on TV now it can be it's seen all over the world and it would be great if it came back to Letter Kenny again so fingers crossed we're putting plans in motion and I suppose there's a few procedures that have to be as a big criteria for do you have it nationally? Well there is I suppose there's generally a lot of competition for it because I suppose you know everybody wants everybody wants it and that's what you have to have your spoken as I say a few years before you actually get it but things will look good I think fingers crossed I think we're we're fairly positive that it will be back in Letter Kenny in the not too distant future. Oh that's great and listen you know where we are to help you promote it I think it's I think it's amazing the work that goes into this that people are willing to do that and well done to yourselves and everybody involved and it's a huge huge undertaking I've no doubt you know we're trying to get all the logistics in the place they you meet up as a group once a month in the Tassie no well once once a week once a week a big apartment once a week yeah once a week every Tuesday night in Sister Sarah's from eight o'clock to ten o'clock oh I thought it said Silver Tassie Silver Tassie is on a Sunday with Lina Legelege on a Sunday afternoon that's with some of the younger musicians they like to come on a Sunday afternoon maybe the second Sunday of every month the second Sunday of every month and that's and have you big numbers at the time Legelege we do have well yes we have good numbers out of yes so the the group that you have obviously you're putting forward here now for you know you're going forward with the flag but as a as a development group are young people encouraged to join and develop their their skills yes from a very young age how can they go about that or a lot of them will be at classes join classes locally and get involved then with the sessions as they get older and the music and does it start off in the schools is that work some of us starts in the schools yes and some of some classes and the local the branches Donegal has a lot of branches of Curtis okay and a lot of the young people we get involved with the different branches is it a healthy place now to one of the yes the the music side of things the music yes it is yes there is a lot of younger the younger generation coming along and it's nice to see it because it's something that could day out very easy isn't it because you know so you meet you meet every week in the town yes and then you meet every the first Sunday and every month then and silver tassie and these days like is it an open session or what yes an open session everybody's welcome from any age all ability all levels of ability I suppose like whenever I retired Paul I took a I played a bit while yet off now I took up the fiddle again and actually I just heard John Breaston say today that that Paddy Glackin is getting the gradually which is the Oscars of traditional music and whenever I was in college in Dublin his father Tom Glackin taught me the fiddle for about three or four months just my final year college then I came home then and gave it up and I just took it up a few years ago and retired yeah I did yeah but I didn't want to inflict that on the listeners tonight I said they didn't do anything on me so it just so happens we have a difficult instrument I suppose if you're talented it's not and if you stick at it like you know there's a there's a there's a younger comes to our um sessions um oh dear um yeah shawna and uh like like she started coming to the sessions whenever I went back to a few years ago and I'm just looking at her and on and all the all the tunes that she can play but uh I really don't have any any great ambition to be a wonderful player I just I just like joining in uh a few jigs and things like that there's a set called Jean's Jigs the Humors of Glen Art and Saddle the Pony and uh uh Tonerous or Tobin's Favourite and and I can manage those at a at a 33 speed not a 45 speed there's people listening I'm probably don't know what you're talking about but I know exactly what you're talking about but uh no that's great and I think it's brilliant that everybody's uh involved and as I say we wish you well right but let's get another piece of music uh if you don't mind so what would we have this time do you need to tune up uh tell you what I'll do you just have a wee think about it right I will go for uh an outbreak and move it back after this don't go away are you refurbishing your bathroom or fitting out a new one for the first time for hassle free expert advice contact mcdade's bathroom plumbing tiles bunkrana we have supplied thousands of bathrooms throughout the north west and our expertise is here to save you money and help you choose your dream bathroom call to our showroom in bunkrana or come and see us at the donnago new build and rebuild 2022 show at the mount aerugal hotel on the first second and third of april mcdade's bathroom plumbing and tiles bunkrana yes indeed you're welcome back it's uh just 25 minutes in front of 10 o'clock on a monday night the monday night sessions and we are joined in studio by our good friends from the cultists who are uh getting organized for the flower on the 6th of may to the 8th of may this year and it's going to be brilliant so well done to them we're going to get another piece of music from them and uh this time uh seasha what are you going to do first um we'll play two jigs this time the first one is my former wife and the second one is the green fields of woodford whenever you're ready thank you very much indeed somebody just who texted on there decided i didn't know if i could dance oh i robert collin robert i'm a very well known dancer uh wouldn't be a very good dancer but i'm a well known dancer so thanks for that well done indeed and uh hello paul and jimmy from john wallace uh please wish good luck and all the best to jean and everyone for the dunagall flat and me and you'll be flat out he says flat out ah very good john that's a me me corny joker we could put a we could put that one on this area ah very good john so i'll ask you seasha uh how can someone get involved uh in in all of us in cultists yes um well so as mijelo said earlier there's cultist branches all around dunagall um so there's ones in ishone gedore fanid and letter kenny um so anyone in the letter kenny area would join the letter kenny cultists and we have sessions every tuesday as mijelo was saying and it's open to anyone and you can go along and ask the join as a member yeah you can come along and join do you have facebook social media yeah so we have a facebook for the cultist cultist letter kenny okay and then we have another facebook for the flat flat lk oh very good so you get all the information on the two facebook pages well it might sound like a long time away but it's not it's only just around the corner and you probably uh you probably pinch yourself a tiny little corner it's only around the corner it is sure it's april this weekend i know that and um shannon your p your pr o you you have a lot of work to do then you have to be the sort of get the communication out there to people is not basically what it is yeah that's really well it's just letting people know everything that's going on promoting the music is this your first time to do it yeah this is like my first year kind of asit in the cultist so how you find it yeah it's been good so far i was uh like a while ago i was writing up a article on everything that our cultist did over like the past two years of covid and stuff what we've been up to like hosting like online zoom sessions and then we zoom workshops and stuff like that so you kept the project was still going ahead yeah through zoom yeah we still had the music going through covid on zoom and everything so we didn't let it stop us no obviously we couldn't get the gallery crowds and that but do you know zoom zoom saved a lot of us saved a lot of our sanity i think you know because we had we had zoom for everything and uh we still actually do zoom things for the meetings and stuff which is great well it's good that you're able to how did you how did you work that as a as a group we we zoomed it how did you do that just well someone like set it up and then we'd all join and then so you don't be on that all then we yeah all the way screens and then someone would someone would play on their own one day and then obviously you know it would kind of the connections and stuff there'll be all echoing and stuff so everyone else had to meet themselves and just the one person playing so everyone else could play along with them very good and the zoom still going on for you know for people that are maybe just too far away and you don't do the zoom still no some people just do the music classes some teachers would still do some of the music classes on zoom but mostly it's at the sessions or everything's live now it's good it's good to see it back live again to be honest and uh but now as i say this album here uh we had that we got that a couple years ago didn't we and it was four years ago yeah is that along with this chain i think was was the jordan brought that up this one time and there's some are you using that yes you know right and just you know and you'll have to get involved in the normal one and all this thing you know okay i have to come and watch this space well listen um it's it's been brilliant i really enjoyed having you up here just before we go oh you're not away yet i thought you were i thought you were i said here's your coat what's your hurry like but you know just for entries to the flower um this weekend will be the closing date for them to send them send them to majella uh you can download the form on www.cultus.ie and you can get information as well on our own facebook fly letter kenny and uh you just email them then to majella at flylk at gmail.com brilliant and uh that's all systems go then i can't i know really looking forward to that because it does create a buzz you know it really really does and and you never know a couple of years we're made of the big fly here and that it'll create somebody you'll have some PR over them and there'll be a program out as well in april uh it's supposed once we finalize plans there'll be a program on sale throughout donnie gall on what's happening yeah very good gene and uh is there any i use video on it i use recorded and any for yourselves or i would say i'd say jule have all that organized yeah i have no doubt he'll have the cameras out i have no doubt at all but uh right before we go i'm gonna say our goodbyes we'd love to get another piece of music if you don't mind have you another piece lined up for us they're looking at you majella aren't they for some reason uh yeah we'll go with jigs again the first tune is mccuse and the second tune is the mist covered mountain thank you very much knit the may and stick it on your diary and tell your family and friends all about it and help support these uh all these people that do great work at keeping the music alive and keeping traditional music alive so thank you very much majella thank you very much indeed shannon and searsha and gene corn gene why aren't you back on the radio again back in sunday night back in sunday night seven to nine nice to be back at night i enjoy your music i love your music come some saturday morning you're on there and i really you just know you turn on the radio you know somebody's on without hearing their voice your bob dillon stuff and the usual suspects the usual suspects are class listen folks thanks very much indeed it's the flower it takes place in letter candy from the sixth of may to the eighth of may and you can check them out for on or all the social media platforms and so w w w dot coldest dot i for the form and then uh the flower uh flower lk facebook page and the coldest letter candy facebook page is there many people applying that's good that's brilliant we'll listen uh if you need any more uh help with it let us know and we'll do our very best here but uh listen folks thank you very much indeed and thanks for coming up and join us and gene all the best and something thank you very much indeed thanks for having us oh you're welcome hi dad just popping on to say hi


Hello everybody, and welcome to the presentation how to foster data sovereignty for OpenStack Cloud based on always self-description. So what does data sovereignty means? This means that you, as the owner of the data, have the control over your data that you can decide in a self-determined way where and how your data is processed, where it's stored, how it's transmitted. And in doing so, you need some information about the properties of the provider, the service, or the resource, the data centers that host the service. And these information are currently not there, or if they are written down where, they are not written in a transparent way, in a machine-readable way. And this can be solved with self-description. You may know the term self-description from GaiaX. GaiaX is a cooperation, a European cooperation, which aims to foster data sovereignty. So it defines standards, concepts, architectures to establish data sovereignty. And we are inspired by that concept of self-description. We reused the self-description and extended a little bit to foster the data sovereignty. So what do we want to do? I will shortly explain you what self-description is. Then I will show you how you can use the self-description to foster data sovereignty. I will show you self-description for OpenStack-based clouds. I will show you the tool stack, and I finish the presentation with a conclusion. What are self-descriptions? I already said it. Self-description are machine-readable, standardized formats to describe the properties of clouds and cloud providers and cloud services. They are also by the cloud provider. They are based on linked data principles. They are serialized in JSON-LD. They can be visualized as RDF graph. They are comparable because it's a standardized and machine-readable format. And you can also sort and query the self-description with, for example, OpenSci for Sparkle or Sparklestar. A self-description is based on a self-description schema. And what is a self-description schema? A self-description schema is in a very simplified way. It's a vocabulary you have, which is available to write the self-descriptions. And it consists of two elements, a taxonomy of classes. As you can see here, this is the taxonomy of classes. You have a top-level class, which is a GAIA-X entity. And there are three Bay subclasses, a participant, a service offering, and a resource. A participant is an entity who offers or consumes service or a provider or a consumer. A service offering is what the name says. It's the service which is offered. And the resource is a building block for a service offering, which is not available for order. And you need this building block in order to describe your cloud service in more detail. This could be, for example, the data center where the service is hosted on. This could be the data itself. It could be the software. All these artifacts can be important for customers, so you need a way to describe these entities. And each class has a set of attested attributes. The attributes can be optional or mandatory. And the mandatoryness is due to trust guidelines. And there is a special document, the trust framework, from Guy X, which defines the attributes which have to be there in order to be Guy X compliant. And mandatory can also be due to technical guidelines. For example, a technical mandatory attribute is the service endpoint to access a service. And these properties are defined by a special subworking group of Guy X. This is a service characteristic working group. Here you see the self-description schema for a legal person. A legal person is a special subclass of participant. And what you can see is that we have three attribute groups which are mandatory. We have a legal address. We have an ad quarter address. And we have a registration number. And the registration number is also subclassed by five different parts. So currently, Guy X supports the like code, the value at a text ID, a local registration number, the economic organization resource identifier, and the European identifier as a registration number. And you have an optional attribute. This is a relationship so that you can model the parent and suborganization relationship between legal persons. Here you can see a self-description for cloud and heat as a legal person. It's visualized as a very simplified RDF graph. What you can see is the subject in the middle, which is cloud and heat. And cloud and heat has two registration numbers, a local one and a value at a text ID. And you see, although, the two mandatory attributes, the headquarter address, which is in Dresden in Germany and the legal address, which here are the same. But there are organizations where the headquarter and legal address differs. How about data sovereignty? How can we use self-description in order to make it easy for the consumers to decide which cloud service to choose? And in order to look at these concepts, we have first to clarify how we identify subjects or entities in Guy X. And this is done by W3C decentralized identifiers, shortly DITS. What is a DIT? A DIT is a ORI that identifies an entity and that an entity is in Guy X a participant resource or a service offering. And the DIT also associates a DIT document to that entity. And this DIT document contains more information about the entity. The DIT is always controlled by someone and this is a participant in that case. And the participant, if the DIT identifies the participant, it's the participant who provides a service offering. It's a participant who maintains the physical resource or it's copyright owner of a virtual resource. So Guy X divide two different types of resource, a physical one, this is a resource you can touch, for example, a data sender or a virtual resource, which could be a data, a software, a license, or something like that. The DIT document expresses metadata, cryptographic material, services, and verification methods for the DIT subject. And the DIT subject is a participant a service offering or a resource. And there is an important part in the DIT document. For staff descriptions, it's a service part. What is a service? A service is an endpoint that you can use to retrieve more information about this participant, the service offering, or this resource the DIT identifies. And we use this services to retrieve a self-description. So when you have a DIT, you have a DIT document. And in the DIT document, there is a reference how to retrieve the self-description with details about the entity which is identified by that DIT. The DIT document is stored in a distributed DIT registry. And you can retrieve the DIT document with a DIT resolver. There are public-available DIT resolver out there. And you give them a DIT when you type in a DIT. You get the DIT document. And I told you already that in the document, there is a reference to the self-description. And that's how you get the self-description for a guy X entity for a participant, a resource or a service offering. As soon as you have the DIT, you cannot retrieve the DIT document. And the DIT is a URI, as I told you. And from the URI, you cannot always deduce the entity which is behind in URI, so that we have an onboarding process where you match the DIT to the entity in the real world, so the DIT of Cloud and Heat to Cloud and Heat, which is identified by the DIT. How do we achieve data sovereignty? So I told you that we have, on the one side, the provider with the services, with the resources. And the provider defines the resource or service offering with the self-description. And on the other side, we have the consumer. And the consumer needs information which are in that self-description. The consumer also knows how to retrieve the self-description, but there's no trust between these two parties. So how does the consumer knows that things a provider is claiming about himself or his services or whatever are true? And this is solved with W3C, very fiber credentials. How does it work? So when you have the provider and the consumer and they don't trust each other, you need a third party, both parties trust. And this is a conformant investment body. What does this entity does? It gets the claims from the provider, for example, the legal address or the ISO certificate, or that's a service of the data senders hosted in Germany. All these claims are sent to the conformant investment body. And this is responsible for checking the integrity, the honesty, and the completeness of that statement. And then it issues a so-called verifiable credential back to the provider. And the provider stores it and can use this verifiable credential to prove a specific set of properties. This concept is not new. We already have it in the physical world as well. So imagine you want to prove another person that you are over a teen. How do you do that? You show the ID card you have, which is issued by the government. And the government is a trustworthy third party, is a conformity assessment body. And because you have this ID card, this temper proof ID card, and the other person that you trust, this ID card, you can prove that you're over a teen. And this is the same in the digital world with W3C verifiable credentials. And the self-description is then just a set of verifiable credentials. So the provider decides what verifiable credential you want to put in a self-description and then publish this self-description. How about the data sovereignty on the provider side? So it may be that the provider has some information you do not want to share with the entire world, but only for a closed user group. For example, a provider do not want to publish the entire architecture and software stack of his services unless there is an NDA signed. And in order to give all of the provider the possibility to decide with whom he wants to share which data, we have developed the concept of a self-declaration. A self-declaration differs from a self-description in two points. The first point is that the self-declaration is complete. That means it contains all information which are available about an entity. And the other thing is that the self-declaration does not contain the full verifiable credentials. So in the self-declaration is not the full address listed, but just a reference where you can download, where you can retrieve the address. And the client can, when it has the self-declaration, can use that link and go to the storage of that verifiable credential and authenticate himself. And then when he is allowed to get this information, he receives the information. So the provider can now, for each verifiable credential, which is in the credential store, can define fine-grained usage policy, who can access this information and who is not allowed to do that. How does this look like in a nutshell? So I told you, we start with issuing verifiable credentials. So the conforming assessment bodies issue the verifiable credential to a credential storage. And this is the organization credential manager. And then the provider defines the self-declaration and decides, OK, which credential do I want to have in that self-declaration for, for example, my organization, my service, my data center, my software stack, whatever. Then this is not good. Then this self-declaration is stored in a self-declaration storage. This is just a public available endpoint where you can download the file with the reference. The consumer knows the did of the entity, and he wants to know more information about that entity. So he takes a did, puts a did in the did resolver. The did document is retrieved. In the did document, there is a link to the self-declaration storage where he can download the self-declaration. And in the self-declaration are the links to the credential store to download the verifiable credentials if he is authorized to do that. How about the self-description schema for OpenStack-based cloud? The schema is very complex, so I cannot present everything. I just focused on three important parts. This is the jurisdiction of the provider of the cloud service. It is the physical locality or the physical location of the data center where the cloud service is hosted on and the interoperability of the API of the cloud. The jurisdiction of cloud provider I already showed you. So we have a service offering, and a service offering had the mandatory association to the participant who provides that service offering. And the participant can be a legal person, can also be a natural person, but we are focusing on legal person here. Legal person, the legal person had this mandatory properties, headquarter, and legal address. And with those two information, you can deduce the jurisdiction. You can figure out which law may be applied to the data which is processed or stored in that cloud service. Here you see the self-description for the OpenStack cloud cloud and heat is providing. So there's a reference to cloud and heat, and this I already showed you is a legal and headquarter address of cloud and heat. How about the physical location of a data center? A data center is modeled as a physical resource in GAIAX. And we have an aggregation between service offering and resource so that you can define which resource your service offering is based on. And the physical resource is a subclass of the resource and has a mandatory attribute location which points to the country or more precisely the country code where the data center is located. And when we look at the cloud and heat OpenStack cloud, we have aggregation to the data center and the location address is here points to the country code. That means which is Germany in that case. So the data center of cloud and heat is located in Germany. And though the German law applies to the data which is processed there. Interoperability of OpenStack clouds. This is also very complex interoperability. So I focused on two parts. This is the VMs and the flavors which are provided by the OpenStack cloud. And to model an OpenStack cloud, we have a special subclass called Virtual Machine. And the Virtual Machine is a subclass of service offering and has two mandatory attributes. There's a code artifact which points to a Virtual Machine image with a lot of properties and also at least one service flavor. And you can define the hardware requirements of that service flavor, for example, the memory requirements, network, the CPU properties, the GPU properties, and the same also for VM image. This is a subset of the interoperability of Cloud and Heat's OpenStack cloud. For sure, we have more than two images and more than two flavors. But in favor of visibility, it just presented you these two to visualize how such a self-description can look like. So we have here images. We have the size of the image, the CPU architecture, the RAM size. We have the license, the copyright owner, and so on. And the same for flavor. That's not a rocket science. How about the tool stack? So we need some tools in order to make these things happen. And there are already some tools out there. We have a portal. The portal is a web-based user interface to create credentials and self-declarations manually. So it's just a format type in all the information. And then it outputs you the appropriate JSON files. There is a generator, a self-description generator coming from the sovereign cloud stack. This is a Python script or a bunch of Python scripts which generates credentials for the OpenStack clouds automatically. So what does this tool do? It takes a normal tenant block in and calls via the API the OpenStack cloud and retrieves technical information such as the flavor sizes, the VM image, the properties of the VM image, the volume types, and so on. We need also a storage where we store the credentials in. And this is the Organization Credential Manager. And this credential manager also provides an interface to access these credentials and also to define the access policies. And we need a self-description storage. The self-description storage does not exist currently, but it's just a web server can be a self-description storage where you can download a file. So it's not rocket science. What are our next steps? So I told you that most of the parts are aligned with Sky-X, but some parts are not. So our next step will be to align all these parts with Sky-X and also to give the additional concepts upstreams. For example, the self-declaration part is not yet Sky-X compliant, so we give this upstream this idea. What we also want to do is to implement a proof of concept of the thing you already said so that you got from a dit to a self-declaration and from the self-declaration to the self-description. And we do it as part of two projects, the TELOS project. It's a German research project and as part of the sovereign cloud stack. And what we also want to do is we want to extend the self-description schema. Right now, the sustainability and security features are not supported. And at least from our point of view, these are very important features which should be included in the self-description of a cloud service. That's all. And now I'm happy to answer your questions. Can you use a mic? You said that the self-descriptions, the main focus is, let's say, machine readability and stuff like that. Exactly. At the same time, you illustrated quite well the complexity of these models. Does it work in practice? If the structure and the hierarchies and the interrelationships are that complex, then I would assume that it might be quite difficult for machine processes to find the information. Honestly, I cannot answer the question because there is no practical survey at the moment. We are just in the beginning. But it's simply the same like the linked data. And the linked data all the work, as far as I know. Because the self-description is nothing else than a big linked data file. So maybe a second question if possible. You said that you want to also extend the GAIAX federation framework with your extensions. So who's responsible for that? Who will accept this or will reject this? What do you mean with the GAIAX framework? Maybe I go back. Do you mean the self-description scheme? Or do you mean the upper part that we want to align the concepts with GAIAX? The upper part. The upper part. Who decides? That is a technical committee. Who decides that? The technical committee or the GAIAX is divided into several working groups. Cloud and Heat is part of that working groups. So we bring this into the technical committee and then they decide hop or top or whatever. OK, thanks. Other questions? There seems not to be the case.