Unifying heterogeneous and distributed information about marine species through the top level ontology MarineTLO
Program: electronic library and information systems
ISSN: 0033-0337
Article publication date: 1 February 2016
Abstract
Purpose
Marine species data are scattered across a series of heterogeneous repositories and information systems. There is no repository that can claim to have all marine species data. Moreover, information on marine species are made available through different formats and protocols. The purpose of this paper is to provide models and methods that allow integrating such information either for publishing it, browsing it or querying it. Aiming at providing a valid and reliable knowledge ground for enabling semantic interoperability of marine species data, in this paper the authors motivate a top level ontology, called MarineTLO and discuss its use for creating MarineTLO-based warehouses.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper the authors introduce a set of motivating scenarios that highlight the need of having a top level ontology. Afterwards the authors describe the main data sources (Fisheries Linked Open Data, ECOSCOPE, WoRMS, FishBase and DBpedia) that will be used as a basis for constructing the MarineTLO.
Findings
The paper discusses about the exploitation of MarineTLO for the construction of a warehouse. Furthermore a series of uses of the MarineTLO-based warehouse is being reported.
Originality/value
In this paper the authors described the design of a top level ontology for the marine domain able to satisfy the need for maintaining integrated sets of facts about marine species and thus assisting ongoing research on biodiversity. Apart from the ontology the authors also elaborated with the mappings that are required for building integrated warehouses.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the project iMarine (FP7 Research Infrastructures, 2011-2014) and the LifeWatch Greece project (National Strategic Reference Framework, 2012-2015), and the European Union and Greek national funds through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) – Research Funding Program (Thales, Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund).
Citation
Tzitzikas, Y., Allocca, C., Bekiari, C., Marketakis, Y., Fafalios, P., Doerr, M., Minadakis, N., Patkos, T. and Candela, L. (2016), "Unifying heterogeneous and distributed information about marine species through the top level ontology MarineTLO", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 16-40. https://doi.org/10.1108/PROG-10-2014-0072
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited