Supporting coral reef ecosystems research through modelling a reusable ontology framework

A set of reusable ontologies has been developed as separate components within a knowledge representation (KR) system, to generically model a reef system. The ontology design, ranging from light to heavyweight, aims to leverage from the scalable characteristics of semantic technologies to allow for flexibility when posing domain and locality-specific hypotheses, such as predicting coral bleaching. The Semantic Reef Project is an eco-informatics application designed to test ecological hypotheses to derive information about environmental systems. The intention is to develop an automated data processing, problem-solving, and knowledge discovery system that will assist in developing our understanding and management of coral reef ecosystems. Remote environmental monitoring (including sensor networks) is being widely developed and used for collecting real-time data across widely distributed locations. As the volume of raw data increases, it is envisaged that bottlenecks will develop in the data analysis phases because current data processing procedures still involve manual manipulation and will soon become unfeasible to manage. Ontologies provide a new approach and methodology for modulating this data overflow while also improving our ability to extract knowledge from the data collected. © 2011 Informa pl