LEAPS: realising the potential of algal biomass production through semantic web and linked data

Recently algal biomass has been identified as a potential source of large scale production of biofuels. Governments, environmental research councils and special interests groups are funding several efforts that investigate renewable energy production opportunities in this sector. However so far there has been no systematic study that analyses algal biomass potential especially in North-Western Europe. In this paper we present a spatial data integration and analysis framework whereby rich datasets from the algal biomass domain that include data about algal operation sites and CO2 source sites amongst others are semantically enriched with ontologies specifically designed for the domain and made available as linked data. We then present a conceptual architecture and a prototype implementation of a GeoWeb service that provides querying and analysing capabilities over the linked datasets.