Highlighted in bold are the key sentences that conform the scenario that the Semantic Framework is going to address.  In summary a scientist is going to subscribe to data. The OOI CI system needs to perform metadata mappings and controlled vocabulary mappings to be able to find sources of interest to the user. Two things need to happen:

• Manage controlled vocabularies and their mappings.
• Develop a tool that provides a faceted search-like interface that will allow  a user to perform a search and subscribe to it 

From "ORION Cyberinfrastructure Concept of Operations - Version 0r08 2006.05.11", Section B: Getting and Using Products - (page 6)

... (POIM refers to the model that Dr. Chu is building and using. It assimilates data to run the model.)

Fortunately, the ORION systems all support a straightforward "publish and subscribe" model for distributing data. A data user can subscribe to a data stream, asking to receive any new data as soon as they is measured by an instrument. In this case, POIM has subscribed to all of the variables it needs, and executes whenever a new value is received for any of them. If data arrive while POIM is running, it will cache them, finish its current execution, and start a new cycle with the cached data. Naturally, the data format for some of the sensors is not what POIM requires. Data transformation can be accomplished by the ORION cyberinfrastructure services. For example, when setting up the original subscription request, Dr. Chu asked for the data to be sent in the units that his program requires. The infrastructure services understand how to translate between instrument units and user units, and do so automatically. The default output format for the data (XML-encoded ASCII data values for this type of request) is provided by each observatory using common ORION cyberinfrastructure software.

Although Dr. Chu didn't realize it, when he originally asked for 'oxygen' data, similar mediation services took care of translating the original language of the observatory instruments, which in one case called the data "O2" and in another case "oxygn", to the more general term oxygen. These mappings rely on semantic ontologies, tools, and services established by other organizations, and they specify how any instrumented variable on ORION corresponds to the more standard vocabularies like GCMD and COARDS/CF. Of course, Dr. Chu had to review all of the data streams for suitability once he discovered them, but this was relatively straightforward. Each variable of interest was presented to him as an ORION resource which could be used to access retrospective data and visualize them, see metadata describing the data sources, look for data products that have been post-processed, and create a subscription for the variable if it is needed. Unfortunately, to Dr. Chu's disappointment, there is one area where the two observatories overlap where critical oxygen and transmissivity data are not available. If he can get measurements from this location, POIM will be able to make many more useful predictions of the observational event of interest.
 

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Detailed use cases here.