Using the Semantic Web to support knowledge integration, retrieval and expansion for ecoinformatics
Tuesday, May 1, 2007, 13:00pm - Tuesday, May 1, 2007, 15:00pm
325b ITE
Today, the information on the World Wide Web is growing at
an astonishing rate providing a rapidly expanding source of
valuable data. The abundance of distributed information on
the Web increases the importance of efficient organization,
sharing and retrieval of available data. This is
particularly important in scientific research where
efficient collaboration, exchange of results of experiments
and observations, fast discovery of relevant information and
data integration from different sources are the key elements
for success.
This thesis investigates how the Semantic Web can be used to facilitate:
- combining information from multiple heterogeneous resources into well structured machine-understandable OWL documents that can be used by humans as well as automated intelligent agents;
- defining OWL ontologies which describe the concepts in Semantic Web representation of data and relationships among those concepts;
- answering complicated queries about the data;
- producing new knowledge as a result of applying ontologies and reasoning to the original data;
- efficient discovery of relevant information and obtaining data in well structured flexible format.
The goal of our research is to investigate the advantages and successful use cases of the Semantic Web as well as identify improvements that can be made to boost the expressivity of Semantic Web languages and usefulness of Semantic Web technologies.