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Abstract:
To address biodiversity issues in ecology and to assess the
consequences of ecosystem changes, large quantities of long-term observational
data from multiple datasets need to be integrated and characterized
in a unified way. Linked open data initiatives in ecology aim at
promoting and sharing such observational data at the web-scale. Here
we present a web infrastructure, named Thesauform, that fully exploits
the key principles of the semantic web and associated key data standards
in order to guide the scientific community of experts to collectively construct,
manage, visualize and query a SKOS thesaurus. The study of a
thesaurus dedicated to plant functional traits demonstrates the potential
of this approach. A point of great interest is to provide each expert with
the opportunity to generate new knowledge and to draw novel plausible
conclusions from linked data sources. Consequently, it is required to consider
both the scientific topic and the objects of interest for a community
of expertise. The goal is to enable users to deal with a small number of
familiar and conceptual dimensions, or in other terms, facets. In this regard,
a faceted search system, based on SKOS collections and enabling
thesaurus browsing according to each end-users requirements is expected
to greatly enhance data discovery in the context of biodiversity studies.
