Using the Semantic Web to Support Ecoinformatics

Abstract

We describe our on-going work in using the semantic web in support of ecological informatics, and demonstrate a distributed platform for constructing end-to-end use cases. Specifically, we describe ELVIS (the Ecosystem Location Visualization and Information System), a suite of tools for constructing food webs for a given location, and Triple Shop, a SPARQL query interface which allows scientists to semi-automatically construct distributed datasets relevant to the queries they want to ask. ELVIS functionality is exposed as a collection of web services, and all input and output data is expressed in OWL, thereby enabling its integration with Triple Shop and other semantic web resources.