Applying semantics in the environmental domain: The TaToo project approach

Abstract

The EU FP7 TaToo project major aim is to bridge the resource discovery gap. This is a well know problem regarding, firstly, the difficulty of discovering resources available on the Web, secondly, the access and possibly the ‘visualisation’ of these resources once discovered. TaToo is trying to solve the problem through a framework (based on semantic concepts) able to store in a knowledge base, meta-information (or metadata) associated with resources. Meta-information is then used by TaToo during the resource discovery process. Meta-information is provided by end users while discovering resources or by resource owners and, as stored in a triplestore, it consists of RDF triples made of Domain Ontologies concepts. Meta-information knowledge base makes possible, together with a reasoner, a resource model for annotation, and a set of Domain Ontologies, a semantically-enhanced resource discovery process. The paper briefly shows the TaToo architecture focusing on the description of those components dealing with semantics. Then, it shows how semantics has been implemented, giving details on the Minimal Environmental Resource Model (MERM) and on the process of integrating Domain Ontologies to realise the ontology framework used in TaToo.