“How can users experience iMarine as one coherent source of facts about marine entities, rather than a bag of contributed contents?” (*) In answer to this question, the Information Systems Laboratory (ISL) of FORTH-ICS developed − for the iMarine project − a top-level ontology for the marine domain.

Access the latest version: MarineTLO – Draft (September 2013)

ISL is interested in your feedback, as well coarse as fine-grained, e.g. comments and suggestions on the elements (concepts, associations, scope notes). Just send an email to [email protected].

Some highlights

Marine TLO:

• Focuses on Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries / Marine Resources  and "should be generic enough to provide consistent abstractions or specifications of concepts included in all data models or ontologies of iMarine data sources such as Ecoscope, TDWG-WORMS,FLOD,AGROVOC, DwC, IBIS." (*)
  
   
• Organizes the information distributed across various infrastructures "by providing a common, agreed–upon, understanding of the concepts and entities and relationships holding between them in order to enable first knowledge sharing and then improve information exchange and integration between heterogeneous sources." (*)
  
   
• Has been expressed as an object-oriented semantic model, comprehensible to as well documentation experts as information scientists and is at the same time readily convertable to machine-readable formats such as RDF Schema, KIF, DAML+OIL, OWL, STEP, etc.
  
   
• Is the backbone of the MarineTLO-based Warehouse, integrating information coming from FishBase, WoRMS, ECOSCOPE, FLOD and DBpedia; containing information (3 M triples) about 40,000 marine species, ecosystems, water areas, vessels, etc. The warehouse is already in use by various services offered by iMarine, like X-Search.

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References

* MarineTLO-Draft, September 2013 (pdf), p 2.

More information

“Marine TLO”, ISL of FORTH-ICS



Y. Tzitzikas, C. Alloca, C. Bekiari, Y. Marketakis, P. Fafalios, M. Doerr, N. Minadakis, T. Patkos and L. Candela. Integrating Heterogeneous and Distributed Information about Marine Species through a Top Level Ontology. In Proceedings of the 7th Metadata and Semantic Research Conference, MTSR'13, Thessaloniki, Greece, November 2013



"Looking for integrated sets of facts about marine species? MarineTLO is what you need," iMarine