PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 27: Emerging ecoinformatic tools and accomplishments for synthetic ecological research across scales
Organizer(s): JA Dunne, ND Martinez, and T Romanuk
Wednesday, August 10, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 510b, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
SPIRE: Semantic Web applications for biodiversity and invasive species.
Quinn, James*,1, 2, 3, Hollander, Allan1, 2, Thorne, James1, 2, 4, Viers, Joshua1, 2, 3, 1 Information Center for the Environment, Davis, CA, USA2 California Information Node (CAIN), Davis, CA, USA3 John Muir Institute of the Environment, Davis, CA, USA4 Conservation International, Washington, DC, USA
ABSTRACT- The emerging Semantic Web extends the existing World Wide Web by building the knowledge framework enabling machines to make unanticipated queries against highly distributed and perhaps heterogeneous data. SPIRE (Semantic Prototypes in Research Ecoinformatics), a collaboration between computer scientists and biologists in the National Biological Information Infrastructure, extends technologies under development for the Semantic Web to problems in information sharing in invasive species management. RDF and OWL may be used to formalize and provide flexible access to invasive species information held by multiple institutions, improving their ability to track new occurrences, assess invasion risks and support rapid response and long term control. Some of the information exchange enabled for invasive species is required by law, treaty obligations, and economic impacts, but the technology should be more broadly applicable to integrating biodiversity information. Mandated exchanges on invasive species recognize resource types such as organizations, projects, web sites, species lists, fact sheets, experts, and individual species observations as being important, but lack a formal portrayal of the relationships between these information classes. Such an ontology is easily provided using Semantic Web vocabularies. We describe two applications that make use of a Semantic Web approach for managing invasive species information. The first of these is a pilot Web-based clearinghouse describing invasives resources in California. Its interface is designed to let the user easily follow the interrelationships between resources, and it is also straightforward to harvest catalog entries for resources off other websites. The second application demonstrates using this approach to map the distribution of invasive species working with both known occurrences and modelled potential distribution. By creating ontologies to represent species distribution data, we are able to aggregate and map species information from diverse sources. We demonstrate this mapping application with examples from California, using a plant distribution database for the state and invasive species occurrence records aggregated from several sources.
Key words: ecoinformatics, semantic web, biodiversity, invasive species