Bioblitz Data on the Semantic Web

Abstract

Last summer, we represented the 1200 species observations of the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz in RDF. This allowed us to easily integrate the data with existing RDF data on natural history, taxonomy, food webs, conservation status, and invasive status. Using our Swoogle/Tripleshop approach to dataset construction, we were able to respond to a variety of ad-hoc queries Our efforts last year were external to the running of the bioblitz. For this year’s blogger bioblitz (late August), we have taken responsibility for data processing, and will encourage participants to make use of two tools we have developed that ease the process of user-generated RDF – the Spotter Firefox plug-in, and RDF123. We will encourage ISWC participants to photo-blog Karlsruhe wildlife during the conference, and to use Spotter to generate RDF of their posts. We will also attempt a full bioblitz of a suitable area near the Conference Centre. Our demo will allow users to browse the dataspace resulting from all observations, together with background data, and to issue SPARQL queries over the data.