The Semantic Naturalist is a new blog that is home for “Musings on natural history, geography, and the Semantic Web.”

“This weblog grows out of the Spire project, which is a research effort to explore applications of semantic web technologies to ecoinformatics and biodiversity conservation. Contributors include Allan Hollander (Information Center for the Environment, UC Davis), Joel Sachs and Cyndy Parr (both with the eBiquity research group, UMBC).”

This is a kind of Bioinformatics that is quite different from what usually comes to mind, but one that will be increasingly important as our planet continues to shrink. Awareness and concern for problems like global warming, environmental changes, invasive species, and endangered species are rising. The public interest in the Encyclopedia of Life project is but one recent example. Ecoinformatics is largely driven by data and much of it is collected and published in a very distributed manner. Geotagging is almost always important. So technologies for data sharing, discovery and integration are of central importance. We think that this is a great use case for Semantic Web technologies and one where we might have significant impact.

(spotted on Fieldmarking)

Related posts:

1. Spire: Semantic Web for Ecoinformatics
2. Elvis meets invasive species on the semantic web
3. WIkiMedia meets the Semantic Web
4. Wikipedia meets the Semantic Web, again
5. Semantic Web in Medical Diagnosis