An application of geographical and statistical linked data to ecology: The Brazilian cerrado ontology network and qualitative reasoning models

This work aims to link data about wood plant communities obtained from scientific studies about the Brazilian Cerrado biome, meteorological and environmental data, geographical information (maps) and Qualitative Reasoning (QR) conceptual models. An ontology network was developed in order to integrate data from different sources. Data Cube, AEMET, GeoSPARQL, and Time ontologies and QR formalism were used as general ontologies. In addition, two domain ontologies - Cerrado Concepts and Wood Plant Dynamics Ontology (Ccon) and Fire Ontology (Fire) - were developed to represent scientific knowledge about vegetation ecology focused on vegetation dynamics under different burning regimens. Datasets provided by Brazilian government agencies and those obtained from scientific literature were transformed into RDF using LOD Refine and visualized in Map4RDF. The interface integrates map visualization using Google Maps API with facet browsing. Given the aggregated information, the application selects scenarios available in the repository and suggests relevant models for the user. Ongoing work investigates possibilities of automatically integrating simulation results. This research has potential to boost both applications of geographical and statistical linked data technologies to new areas, and perspectives for including results obtained from simulation models into ecological research and applications.