Spotter 1.0

We’ve released a new version of Spotter, our Firefox plug-in for semantic eco-blogging. Launching Spotter brings up a form that prompts for values such as reporter, observer, taxon, common name, lat, long, etc. Upon form submission, the user is given the URI of the RDF record that was created from her input. This URI can then be used to link to the RDF from a blog post. (This is what we’ve been doing on the Fieldmarking blog – click on the owls to view RDF.) The plug-in can also be used to provide RDF annotation to someone else’s image, either on a blog or on a photo-sharing site.

More background on our eco-blogging effort is here

You can download Spotter here

The new version supports default values, and includes a map-based lat/long finder. Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

TOAD Modelling

A basic query to ask in biogeography is ‘what species lives here?’. There are a lot of data resources to answer that question. I come up with at least four different types of data resources. First, there are direct records of observations of species, one online example being the citizen science effort eBird which allows birdwatchers to record on the Web what birds they’ve seen. There are coarse-scale range maps, an example being the map in this species account on the mountain lion. There are species lists collected over a substantial period of time, such as lists from parks and nature reserves. Finally, there are probabilistic distribution models generated by tools such as openModeller.

We have just started work on a Semantic Web application that will return information in RDF on species status and distribution for a selected geographic area. The aim of the application is to provide a framework for amalgamating the four types of data sources above into some sort of uniform species list. (I’m calling this TOAD data, for Taxon Observation And Distribution. A TOAD ontology may be in the not-too-distant future.)

I think the basic data granule here comes down to who-where-what-when? That is, a combination of data source by geographic region by taxonomic entity by time period. For now the idea is to concatenate the who-where-what-when parameters into a single URI, thus designating it as a resource over which one can return an RDF description. Variants of this URI pattern will return information such as species lists for a particular region (either according to one data source or across all data sources handled by the system), sets of observation data for a particular species, or metadata for a data source.