DOE NA-22 recently initiated planning for multi-lab assessment projects in the area of nuclear proliferation. Initially, this was a planning effort for a project expected to begin in FY 10 as a team effort between DOE National Labs on Integrated Modeling Assessment. However, early in the planning stage, some subproject received approval for an early start. LBNL and LANL were selected by DOE HQ to lead an Ontology Development sub-team of a newly created Ontology Project. As approved by DOE in July 2009, The Ontology Development sub-team will develop and demonstrate approaches, techniques, methods and processes that utilize emerging technologies for the development of an ontological structure to support assessment and monitoring missions. The core ontology will have an overall structure that can be applied to the nuclear proliferation area, but the semiconductor device manufacturing industry will serve as a demonstration context with content that is not classified. LBNL is developing an initial ontology which will be released to successively larger audiences and iteratively developed as comments are received. Other sub-teams are developing use cases, validation methods and applications for the ontology. The results to date are largely to specify the overall intent of the project and to hastily assemble a multi-lab collaboration. DOE HQ has expressed satisfaction with how rapidly the National Labs were able to come together and get organized on this effort.
July 2009 � new release of the eXtended Metadata Registry (XMDR) web prototype made available at XMDR. org. This is a product of the LBNL Semantics and Metadata for Ecoinformatics project. February 2009 � Committee Draft 2 of ISO/IEC 11179 Part 3 Edition 3 went out for three month ballot. The LBNL Semantics and Metadata for Ecoinformatics project participants are the primary contributors of proposed specifications for the standard, LBNL staff maintains the model, and LBNL staff is very involved in negotiating the content of he standard as it progresses through the standards development process. August 2009 (in progress) � The Final Committee Draft of ISO/IEC 11179 Part 3 Edition 3 will be sent out for four month ballot. The LBNL Semantics and Metadata for Ecoinformatics project participants will help to organize comments and propose solutions to issues identified during the ballot process.