 |
Enabling Ecoinformatics
Enabling the goals of Ecoinformatics requires technical infrastructure to provide access to integrated knowledge, in the form of data, models, and analytical procedures. Much of the Collaboratory's activities are aimed at designing, building and delivering open source software to support these goals. We maintain the www.integratedmodelling.org site for in-depth technical discussion of our software offers. The pages on this section of the site discuss our technologies in simpler terms and give an overview of their rationale.
Among our focal areas in technological development:
 | Development of integrating software architectures to seamlessly link heterogeneous data, models and analytical workflows
| | Development of data, model, and metadata standards
| | Technologies and tools for biodiversity conservation, land use and protected area optimization
| | Frameworks for spatially-explicit land use change modelling
| | Intelligent reasoning to mediate between land cover and land use typologies
| | Infrastructure for global modelling of the socio-economic and ecological dynamics of the Earth |
| Integrating modelling infrastructure
The Integrating Modelling Architecture is a generic, comprehensive, and extendible knowledge representation framework and C++ development kit. It provides clean and powerful abstractions that allow definition and use of interoperable model components based on explicit, extendible ontologies. Besides allowing spatially explicit simulation, model optimization, GIS analysis, visualization and advanced statistical analysis, the IMA provides a database development toolkit that can be used to create advanced online knowledge bases with minimal resources.
The IMA design and software are being used in projects worldwide. See the correspondent page on this site for more information. Also, the site www.integratedmodelling.org is dedicated to the IMA and gives full access to the design, the software and the documentation. |
|
| GrOWL: graphical knowledge mapping and editing
All of our online databases and tools use interactive knowledge maps that allow user to navigate the concepts and follow the logical relationships between the knowledge that constitutes a discipline and is reflected in a database. These maps feature pop-up explanations of each concept and relationships, and constitute tremendous learning tools that suit both the "hunter" and the "gatherer" style of database user.
GrOWL is the software framework that we are developing to provide graphical, intuitive browsing and editing of knowledge maps. GrOWL is open source and is used in several projects worldwide. |
| ThinkCap: collaborative knowledge portal
ThinkCap is a web application that provides user interfaces over a a remote, multi-ontology knowledge base, meeting the needs of non-technical as well as technical users. It allows remote users to develop shared conceptualization that are automatically formalized into OWL or RDFS ontologies. Users can search for concepts using a sophisticated text search that indexes concept descriptions as well as related web resources or documents. Concepts that are found can be explored in several ways, including graphical concept maps. Concepts that are not found can be submitted for inclusion, in more or less formal ways according to the technical level of the user.
ThinkCap is also a knowledge portal toolkit that allows extensive customization. By modifying or creating new thinkcap templates and/or extension plug-ins, sophisticated knowledge-based applications can be developed. |
|
|
