Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-31 10:00 AM – 10:15 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-07
Abstract
Sharing knowledge of species is an important effort for evaluating and saving biodiversity. Taxon names play a key role for such knowledge sharing and therefore platforms like the Global Names Architecture have been developed.
On the other hand, Tim Berners-Lee, who proposed the World-Wide Web, coined and has been advocating the concept "Linked Data" which enables us to share knowledge more effectively. Under the Linked Data principles, all the things are denoted by HTTP URLs and useful information should be able to be acquired in the standardized format by accessing those URLs. Recently, emphasizing open licensed aspect of many Linked Data projects, we often use the term "Linked Open Data" (LOD) as well.
In this paper, we introduce the design of "LODAC species". LODAC (Linked Open Data for ACademia) project is for sharing academic knowledge in the style of LOD and consists of multiple domain-specialized sub-projects. In LODAC species, which is one of those sub-projects for the biological domain and core of which is a vast amount of taxonomic information of species, we assigned URLs to taxon names including scientific and common one based on conventional publications. This Names-based design enabled us to connect heterogeneous data like information about specimens in museums and Red list information easily. We illustrate how this platform connect heterogeneous data and discuss pros and cons of Names-based LOD architecture.