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

The heart of ecoinformatics at multiple scales: Ontologies for ecological information.

Martinez, Neo^{*,1, 2}, Williams, Richard^{1, 2, 3}, ¹ Pacific Ecoinformatics and Compuational Ecology Lab, Berkeley, California, USA² Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Crested Butte, Colorado, USA³ Computer Science Department, San Francisco, California, USA

ABSTRACT- One of the most difficult problems in current and especially future ecological research across multiple scales is the access to, and analysis of, information of many different types and qualities from many different organisms and habitats collected for many different purposes. This astounding heterogeneity has been a constant challenge in synthetic analyses such as meta-analyses and will only become more challenging as more and different ecological and other environmental information is generated. The most promising information technologies that address this challenge, such as the semantic web proposed by the creators of the WWW as the next major evolution of the WWW, depend on ontologies that describe the different types of information and relationships among these types in a machine readable manner. The combination of ecological information and its relationship to other information in commonly called knowledge such that the combination of ecological information and ontologies provide the foundation of ecological knowledgebases that promise to greatly facilitate research that intelligently combines vastly more information of many different types to yield vast new advances in ecological research. Creating these essential ontologies demand collaboration between ecologists and computer scientists. Ecologists engaged in such collaborations will likely be the first achieve such advances. This talk will describe such a collaboration and several of the ontologies that a resulting from the collaboration along with the future work on ecological ontologies necessary to realize more of the potential ecoinformatic advances leading to a new more data rich and conceptually integrative ecology.

Key words: Ecoinformatics, Ontologies, Semantic Web, heterogenous information