The Interageny/International Ecoinformatics Cooperation and Applied knowledge management technologies in EEA services (with Antonio de Marinis) Stefan Jensen, EEA, Copenhagen

EEA/EIONET/Ecoinformatics activities jointly with Enviroinfo Vienna 2002:EIONET workshop Sofia 2003:EIONET workshop seperate Geneva 2004:EIONET workshop and Ecoinformatics sessions Brno 2005:EIONET workshop INSPIRE workshop Graz 2006:Ecoinformatics workshop

Todays common workshop umbrella emphasising managing semantics

Knowledge management technologies in EEA services Stefan Jensen, Antonio De Marinis EEA (DK) Knowledge Management Tools within the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Michael T. Frame, Gladys Cotter, USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (US) Examples of Integrating Ecological Information on the Semantic Web (Video presentation) Joel Sachs, Cynthia Simms Parr, University of Maryland (US) Automatic Concept Space Generation in Support of Resource Discovery in Spatial Data Infrastructures Paul Smits and Anders Friis-Christensen, DG Joint Research Centre (BE) Presentations in this workshop

Intro and background Ecoterm grew out of the Ecoinformatics International Cooperative Initiative In 2003, Technical Working Group realised the need to share terminology and meaning in support of data sharing Realised that this needed to be an international effort

Charter Statement of Mission Make environmental terminologies more interoperable and generally useful Standards regarding terminology will provide the integration of meaning and definitions across heterogeneous data and information systems allowing users of the data to understand the similarities and differences among terms and data. Ecoterm information available from the Ecoinformatics Web site –

Ecoterm Meetings Ecoterm Meetings I – Geneva, April 2004 II – Berlin, April 2005 III – Rome, May 2006 IV – Vienna, Spring 2007 (planned) participants from a variety of environmental terminology organizations Participants include terminology developers, IT professionals, and those interested in multilingual issues from governments, intergovernmental organizations (especially UN agencies), scientific institutions, corporations and vendors

Technical Activities Collecting information about environmental terminology resources Taxonomy of knowledge organization systems (KOS) and definitions of relationship types Reviewing relevant terminology standards Investigating technologies for interoperability such as SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems)

Technical Activities, contd. Intersections with the enhancements, in particular the XMDR Project Develop use cases, including scenarios, needed KOSs and audience(s) Terminology web services and the Semantic Web

Web Services Prototype US National Agricultural Library developed a prototype terminology web service Search in NAL’s Agricultural Thesaurus (NALT), select a term, transfer it to GEMET and search using terms in other languages USGS/BIO used SKOS and web services with GEMET and the Biocomplexity Thesaurus

Current issues: Ecoterm III Meeting Topics Developing and Maintaining KOS Content Delivering and Visualizing the KOS KOS Interoperability Update on Standards SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems) Terminology Mark-up Framework Working Session Environment as a Community of Interest Discussion of Common Semantic Relations

Ecoterm III Outcomes Develop metadata for KOS (FAO and USGS) Develop a registry of environmental KOSs with metadata (FAO, USGS, UNEP) Implement and populate a registry of current terminology web services (USGS) Extend the development of SKOS-based interoperable KOSs by adding additional systems and integrated search and display (EEA, USGS and FAO)

Applied knowledge management technologies in EEA services (with Antonio de Marinis) Stefan Jensen, EEA, Copenhagen

Starting points Developing GEMET thesaurus since 1996 (ca terms in 21 languages, polyhierarchy, Definitions in 5 languages) > Indexing metadata (catalogues) for harmonisation and search purposes > translation support Developing EEA Glossary since 1998 (ca terms in EEA languages, EEA website oriented) > Indexing EEA websites for navigation purposes

Nowadays challenges More in-depth (semantic) linkages of websites using multiple (multilingual) terminology resources Multiple approaches in maintaining and providing semantic tools

ALiSS definition and goal ALiSS is a software agent - more precisly an adaptive web agent - which makes use of specific ontologies in order to semantically organise, adapt and relate information on the web - making one step towards the Semantic Web. Goal: The goal is to assist the user in navigating the web. The user will find the right information at the right time and context. The webmaster will not have to manually create and maintain a large number of links and related information. ALiSS will take care of this!

Use case ”Related pages” Starting a semantic search Flash search demo: tories/Zope/branches/ALiSS_ag ents/ALiSS/client/flash/distribut ion/screenshots.htm

Related pages: Full results of semantic search

Use case: “What does it mean?” (Auto Glossary/Web SmartTags) Highlight terms, show definition about terms on mouse over (in side area or within text)

Structure: Auto Site Index / Site Map A-Z index TermA Webpage 1 Webpage 2 TermB Webpage 3 TermC Webpage 4 TermD Webpage 3 Webpage 5 Webpage 1 Hierarchical (site map) TermA Webpage 1 Webpage 2 TermB Webpage 3 TermC Webpage 4 TermD Webpage 3 Webpage 5 Webpage 1 Thesauri-driven hierarchical website index

Use case: ”Query various resources” Development ALISS server, AZ-index:

Advancing GEMET: Beyond below services GEMET XML (RDF + SKOS) SOAP (RDF + SKOS) XML/RPC HTTP display term definitions, translate terms Web services building custom interfaces translators applications that need off-line data browse GEMET on-line Web applications using the API to implement searches, definitions, translations, etc.

To: GEMET terminology in collaborative initiatives Try it out and e.g. add your Babel profile...

Thank you for your attention!