We describe our on-going work in using the semantic web in support of ecological informatics, and demonstrate a distributed platform for constructing end-to-end use cases. Specifically, we describe ELVIS (the Ecosystem Location Visualization and Information System), a suite of tools for constructing food webs for a given location, and Triple Shop, a SPARQL query interface which allows scientists to semi-automatically construct distributed datasets relevant to the queries they want to ask. ELVIS functionality is exposed as a collection of web services, and all input and output data is expressed in OWL, thereby enabling its integration with Triple Shop and other semantic web resources.

1. Using the Semantic Web to Support Ecoinformatics Andriy Parafiynyk University of Maryland, Baltimore County http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/319/Using-the-Semantic-Web-to-Support-Ecoinformatics Joint work with Tim Finin , Joel Sachs, Cynthia Sims Parr, Rong Pan, Lushan Han, Li Ding (UMBC), Allan Hollander (UCD), David Wang (UMCP)  This research was supported by NSF ITR 0326460 and matching funds received from USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure

5. OLD NEW Green: data gathering; Pink: data integration and manipulation White: data analysis; Blue: results dissemination Collect data OR Find data tables in literature or data registry OR Email author of data Massage data manually Write up metadata record Register dataset with data registry Start over for next project Run analyses Publish paper Post supplemental data file on web Create local spreadsheet Build automatically updating dynamic dataset Develop intelligent query for semantic web data Download to local spreadsheet Run analyses Publish paper Reanalyze using latest dataset (Query and data already publicly available)

8. East River Valley Trophic Web http://www.foodwebs.org/

19. Search for ontologies which contain this terms 1

20. 746 ontologies were found that had these two terms By default, ontologies are ordered by their ‘popularity’, but they can also be ordered by date or size.

21. We can also search for any RDF documents containing these terms

22. 5,378 documents were found that had these two terms

24. What are body masses of fishes that eat fishes? . . . leaving out the FROM clause Swoogle Triple Shop

25. specify dataset

26. RDF documents were found that might have useful data

27. We’ll select them all and add them to the current dataset.

28. We’ll run the query against this dataset to see if the results are as expected.

29. The results can be produced in any of several formats

30. Results http://sparql.cs.umbc.edu/tripleshop2/

31. Looks like a useful dataset. Let’s save it and also materialize it the TS triple store.