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A faceted search system for facilitating the understanding and the prediction of ecosystem changes
Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-30 03:44 PM – 03:53 PM
Last modified: 2013-10-07
Abstract
To address biodiversity issues in ecology and to assess the consequences of ecosystem changes, large quantities of long-term observational data from multiple data sets need to be integrated and characterized in a unified way. Linked open data initiatives in ecology aim at promoting and sharing such observational data at the web-scale. Here we present a web infrastructure, named Thesauform, that fully exploits the key principles of the semantic web and associated key data standards in order to guide the scientific community of experts to collectively construct, manage, visualize and query a SKOS thesaurus. The study of a thesaurus dedicated to plant functional traits demonstrates the potential of this approach. This thesaurus, once built using the Thesauform tool by experts in functional ecology, is used to semantically annotate scientific data managed through heterogeneous data sources, such as the TRY database or the Plant Ontology. In this regard we want to emphasize the critical importance of properly connecting observational data with each other. The construction of a SKOS vocabulary facilitates the definition of clear semantic bridges between different data sources. The participation of experts, not only for the construction of thesauri, but also to validate the work related to semantic annotations, strengthens the proposed approach.
A point of great interest is to provide each expert with the opportunity to generate new knowledge and to draw novel plausible conclusions from linked data sources. Consequently, it is required to consider both the scientific topic and the objects of interest for a community of expertise. The goal is to enable users to deal with a small number of familiar and conceptual dimensions, or in other terms, facets.In this regard, a faceted search system, based on SKOS collections and enabling thesaurus browsing according to each end-users requirements is expected to greatly enhance data discovery in the context of biodiversity studies.
A point of great interest is to provide each expert with the opportunity to generate new knowledge and to draw novel plausible conclusions from linked data sources. Consequently, it is required to consider both the scientific topic and the objects of interest for a community of expertise. The goal is to enable users to deal with a small number of familiar and conceptual dimensions, or in other terms, facets.In this regard, a faceted search system, based on SKOS collections and enabling thesaurus browsing according to each end-users requirements is expected to greatly enhance data discovery in the context of biodiversity studies.