Delivering Environmental Knowledge: a Semantic Approach

Abstract

Environmental informatics delivers techniques and tools for archiving and processing environmental data. The advent of the Internet had positively affected the availability and ease of access to large and diverse environmental databases, distributed all over the world. On the other hand, similar progress has not been matched by the availability of models and algorithms able to process these data, mostly because of the lack of standards in the annotation of the characteristics of environmental models. In this paper we advocate the need for the semantic annotation of environmental “knowledge”, encompassing models and data. The slow, but steady, introduction of the Semantic Web and the widespread use of ontologies for semantic annotation will allow environmental informatics to cover the gap in the access and usability of models and algorithms for environmental data processing.