A knowledge base for Exploited Marine Ecosystems

In 2008, IRD started to work on setting up a knowledge base (named Ecoscope) about Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries domain (EAF) in the context of a marine ecology laboratory studying Exploited Marine Ecosystems in different regions of the world. This application was meant to fit the needs of researchers by improving knowledge and related information resources management [14,12]. Among other goals, researchers expected an information system enabling to provide an inventory of available data sources (ecological observations, satellites images, pictures, articles, reports..) and facilitating data rescue, data access, data processes (indicators..) as well as the ability to summarize related knowledge through fact sheets about domain entities (ecosystems, species..) connected with hyperlinks (based on ecosystem relationships). Beyond metadata, data management and related interoperability issues (OGC, TDWG. . . ), this project was then a real opportunity to set up an ontology for EAF domain in order to link existing information resources with real-world entities (EAF domain concepts). To achieve these goals, semantic Web standards and reference RDF schemas have been taken into account (SKOS, Dublin Core, FOAF, OBOE, Darwin Core. . . ) and a first version of RDF schema for EAF domain has been set up. These ontologies have been instantiated to describe our information resources and some knowledge about entities that researchers are studying. A first Website has been set up on top of this knowledge Base. Related Web pages consist mainly in fact sheets about domain entities (ecosystems, top predators and related preys species, fishing vessels..persons) where users can find related information resources (spatial layers, articles, pictures, indicators..). Knowledge can as well be summarized through networks of entities like food webs with dedicated visualizations tools. This is made possible by querying the knowledge base where Linked metadata and data (in underlying databases) are tagged with related species URIs. Proof has been done that Semantic Web languages can be used to fit the needs of our colleagues. Moreover, in the context of iMarine FP7 project, we started to deal with partners having similar projects (FLOD from FAO, Worms, FORTH). We then set up a SPARQL endpoint and OpenSearch access to share the content our knowledge bases with other applications (search engines, text mining applications..). We will present our current application and related technical choices as well as futur plans to connect additional data sources to enrich this knowledge base and make it available for our partners. In particular we will describe some use cases related to biodiversity management issues. 1 Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries In this paper, we present our work on knowledge management applied to the domain of Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF). According to FAO [5], EAF is an approach that: strives to balance diverse societal objectives, by taking into account the knowledge and uncertainties about biotic, abiotic, and human components of ecosystems and their interactions and applying an integrated approach to fisheries within ecologically meaningful boundaries. We used this definition to create a conceptual model as schown in the UML diagram class of Figure 1.