JISC

Overview

Motivated by the large quantity of diverse data in the freshwater biology community, FISH.Link will provide a demonstrator of the benefits of publishing data by illustrating how data can be combined, repurposed and reused with attribution and provenance information to promote data sharing. The project intends to support the sharing and integration of research data through the application of lightweight vocabularies and vocabulary mapping, facilitating integration of data sets, and moving towards the Web of Data that forms the current Linked Open Data vision. A case study that addresses a real scientific question will be used to provide motivation, requirements and support evaluation.

Aims and Objectives

FISH.Link project aims to produce tools that allow fresh water biologists to publish data in to the Linked data Cloud. FISH.Link tools will be integrated in to the FISHnet platform that supports the data-life cycle in fresh water science. Objectives are:

1. provide tooling for conversion, semantic mark up and mapping of freshwater biology data to linked open data;
2. support attribution and provenance of those data;
3. integrate with FISHnet tools to further support the data life-cycle;
4. run a freshwater biology case study to support motivation, requirements and evaluation.

Project Methodology

University of Manchester: Project Management, tool development

Freshwater Biological Association: Problem holders, interaction with stake holders, evaluation

King's College London: Repository integration, liaison with Fishnet

Queen Mary College University of London: Case study and domain knowledge

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

1. Scenarios for annotating, linking, browsing, querying and re-using information at a fine-grained level within and across datasets.
2. Analysis of selected datasets pertinent to the Case Study.
3. Toolset, leveraging vocabulary and semantic technologies for annotating, exposing, discovering and querying heterogeneous datasets, integrated with the FreshwaterLife/FISHnet repository environment.
4. Enhanced freshwater, and related, vocabularies.
5. A body of linked and annotated data created by means of the toolset on the basis of the selected original datasets.
6. Case study report.
7. Case study research outputs.
8. Architectural and technical documentation.
9. Mid-project and final reports.

Technology / Standards

The project will use W3C Metadata standards: OWL/OWL2, RDF, SPARQL, SKOS.