Peter Wayner’s article in today’s New York Times by Peter Wayner, Helping Computers to Search With Nuance, Like Us mentions our research on exploring how the Semantic Web can be used to help Biologists share data and knowledge. This work is part of the NSF sponsored Spire project which is a team effort involving UMBC, UMCP, UC Davis and the Rocky Mountain Biological Institute.

“When Cynthia Sims Parr steps out to a Maryland field to look for nonnative birds and butterflies, half her thoughts are back in the computer lab where she will collate the data. Dr. Parr, who has appointments in both the life sciences and computer studies at the University of Maryland, melds her biology training with the ideas of computer scientists who are building custom adaptable databases. In the field, she records information about the species she sees and adds details like their location and activity. In the lab, she creates a flexible logical structure for the data to avoid linguistic confusion.” (link)

During the first years of the project we developed OWL ontologies (e.g., ETHAN) to represent the terms and properties necessary to express natural history and evolutionary tree information and used it to published taxon data derived from the Animal Diversity Web and other Biological sources. During the last year, we have been building tools to help biologies and ecologists to publish, find and use data that has been described and annotated with such semantic information. We are currently exploring how these tools can work with social media systems and infrastructure such as blogs and photo sharing sites (e.g., see Adding Semantics to Social Websites for Citizen Science).

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t mention UMBC, but rather the “University of Maryland”.

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