A framework to process complex biodiversity queries

Abstract

Tackling biodiversity information is essentially a distributed effort. Data handled are inherently heterogeneous, being provided by distinct research groups and using different vocabularies. Queries in biodiversity systems require to correlate these data, using many kinds of knowledge on geographic, biologic and ecological issues. Available biodiversity systems can only cope with part of these queries, and end users must perform several manual tasks to derive the desired correlations, because of semantic mismatches among data sources and lack of appropriate operators. This paper presents a solution based on Web services to meet these challenges. It relies on ontologies to retrieve the query contexts and uses the terms of this context to discover suitable sources in data repositories. This approach is being tested using real data, with new services.

A standards-based framework to foster geospatial data and process interoperability

“…Again, we point out that we have not considered ontologies in this work, even though they are another important means of improving data and process interoperability. For detail on on our work in this direction, the reader is referred to 16 . Ontologies are also subject of ongoing work as part of our annotation efforts 42 .…”

“…More importantly, it has leveraged application development, so that users can start testing their ideas much sooner, while we work on other system issues. This does not mean that WebMAPS will necessarily always rely on Google Maps for cartographic rendering and interaction -we are also experimenting with other kinds of Web servicebased solutions (see Daltio et al 16 for our use of GeoServer to publish GML data for biodiversity systems).…”

“…Services present a generic way of encapsulating operations from a system, making them available in a uniform way. Ontologies are out of this paper's scope, being tackled elsewhere 15,16,42 .…”

Aondê: An ontology Web service for interoperability across biodiversity applications

“…The Image Annotation service [8] helps users to annotate images with metadata and ontology terms. The Ecologically aware query service [10,9] allows users to pose queries on ecological relationships among species (e.g., predator-prey). Most of the Storage Layer Services have been implemented as prototypes, using a DBMS, but not as full-fledged WSs.…”

A standards-based framework to foster geospatial data and process interoperability

“…Services present a generic way of encapsulating operations from a system, making them available in a uniform way. Ontologies are out of this paper's scope, being tackled elsewhere 15,16,42 . This paper discusses recent efforts in interoperability for geospatial processes and data that are based on standards and services.…”