Linked Open Biodiversity Data (LOBD): A semantic application for integrating biodiversity information

MARCOS ZÁRATE; PAULA ZERMOGLIO; JOHN WIECZOREK; ANABELA PLOS; RENATO MAZZANTI

Conferencia; Conferencia. TDWG 2020. . 2020 - . Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG); 2020

TDWG

Scientists frequently collect biological and environmental information over years and store it in database systems to answer their own research questions without exposing it in repositories that make it easy to find and retrieve.While in recent years the community working on biodiversity informatics has made significant strides by creating common shared vocabularies such as the Darwin Core (DwC, Wieczorek et al. 2012) and publishing mechanisms such as the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT, Robertson et al. 2014), integration is largely limited to the aggregation of datasets and full interoperability has still not been achieved. In this context, The Semantic Web (SW) aims to represent information in a way that, in addition to the human-centered display purposes, it can be used autonomously by machines for integration and reuse across applications. From the biodiversity informatics point of view, interoperability and links among data sources would allow integration of information that is otherwise disconnected, enabling scientists to answer broader questions. These considerations provide strong motivations to formulate a web application considering the semantic interoperability that may provide answers to questions such as the following:(Q1) Is it possible to complement taxonomic, bibliographic and environmental information of a particular species without relying on specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)?(Q2) How to relate occurrences of species with environmental variables within a specific region?(Q3) What are the bibliographic references associated with a given species?With questions such as these in mind, we present the design of a proof-of-concept application: Linked Open Biodiversity Data (LOBD). LOBD uses Linked Data (LD) (Heath and Bizer