Semantic Prototypes in Ecological Informatics

CAIN is participating in a research project investigating how semantic web technologies can be used to support the field of ecoinformatics. This project, entitled SPIRE (Semantic Prototypes in Ecological Informatics), is funded by the National Science Foundation in the form of a five year award from the ITR program. There are five collaborators in the project: in addition to CAIN and NBII, collaborators include the eBiquity research group at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the MINDSWAP lab at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology lab, and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

SPIRE will develop a framework to facilitate science research and education on the semantic web, and will implement and evaluate prototype tools and applications for use in the biocomplexity and biodiversity domains. These capabilities include the ability to collaborate and convey meaning through the automatic and semi-automatic semantic annotation of web documents; to improve information retrieval using background knowledge and inference; and to extract and fuse information from multiple, heterogeneous sources in response to a query. The framework will include specifications for ontologies, protocols, agents, and tools for authoring, automated ingest, and annotation. Additional domain-independent, general purpose ontologies will be developed to enable metadata about the contents and structure of databases and other knowledge repositories to be expressed in emerging knowledge markup languages such as RDF and OWL. This will enable agents to both access and index the hidden web, and will also support the data mining of diverse and distributed databases.