Towards semantically-enabled exploration and analysis of environmental ecosystems

We aim to inform the development of decision support tools for resource managers who need to examine large complex ecosystems and make recommendations in the face of many tradeoffs and conflicting drivers. We take a semantic technology approach, leveraging background ontologies and the growing body of open linked data. In previous work, we designed and implemented a semantically-enabled environmental monitoring framework called SemantEco and used it to build a water quality portal named SemantAqua. In this work, we significantly extend SemantEco to include knowledge required to support resource decisions concerning fish and wildlife species and their habitats. Our previous system included foundational ontologies to support environmental regulation violations and relevant human health effects. Our enhanced framework includes foundational ontologies to support modeling of wildlife observation and wildlife health impacts, thereby enabling deeper and broader support for more holistically examining the effects of environmental pollution on ecosystems. Our results include a refactored and expanded version of the SemantEco portal. Additionally the updated system is now compatible with the emerging best in class Extensible Observation Ontology (OBOE). A wider range of relevant data has been integrated, focusing on additions concerning wildlife health related to exposure to contaminants. The resulting system stores and exposes provenance concerning the source of the data, how it was used, and also the rationale for choosing the data. In this paper, we describe the system, highlight its research contributions, and describe current and envisioned usage.