Dr Siddeswara Guru1, Mr Javier Sanchez Gonzalez, Mr Edmond Chuc, Mr Gerhard Weis
1University Of Queensland, Long Pocket, Australia
Lack of a data aggregation platform to access a wide range of ecological survey-based observations from multiple organisations is severely impeding trans-geography and trans-disciplinary research. One of the challenges to integrate ecological survey-based observation is the lack of agreed standards to represent and exchange survey data. TERN has developed ontology to represent plot-based survey data to overcome the challenges expressed before. The proposed ontology is derived from Observation and Measurement (O&M) and Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) Ontology. Ontology represents concepts related to site, site visit, feature of interest, observation, sample and sampling. The ontology uses controlled vocabularies to describe feature types, attributes and observable properties. EcoPlots, a semantic data integration platform is developed to harmonise and aggregate survey-based observations from multiple sources and enable users to access integrated data. The platform enables ingestion of institutional databases through ontology-based Extract Transform and Load (ETL) method where all source data are mapped to TERN ontology. The EcoPlots provides users to query data from multiple organisations and download comparable datasets for further reuse.
We will present the working of EcoPlots and describe how data are integrated from multiple sources. We will showcase how to access dataset from survey data collections currently available in the platform.
Biography:
Siddeswara Guru is a program lead of the Data Services and Analytics Platform in the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN). He initiates, coordinates and manages projects to manage ecosystem data and building of related e-infrastructure and analytical platforms.