Semantic Enhancements for Ecological Data Management

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of California at Santa Barbara is awarded a grant to address semantic data heterogeneity in ecology by developing and deploying innovative software services that use ontologies and automated reasoning. Ontology-based searches will allow scientists to find data using familiar and meaningful scientific terms, but with better precision and recall than is possible with text-based searches available today. The Morpho and Metacat data-management tools, initially developed by the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, will be extended to support semantic annotations, semantic queries, and sensible data summarization. These tools will provide an open, interoperable semantic software framework. The broader ecological and informatics community will contribute use cases, usability requirements, and feedback on the proposed additions through workshops at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the Long Term Ecological Research Network. Improving and extending the Morpho and Metacat software systems will benefit the hundreds of ecological field stations in the US and abroad that currently utilize this software for data archiving and discovery. These new semantic software capabilities and improved usability of existing tools will result in more scalable and efficient data synthesis, thereby allowing scientists, students, and educators to better understand and manage complex systems and human-induced global problems. The project will be a collaborative effort with the University of California at Davis.