HR: 09:25h
AN: IN51C-06    [Abstracts]
TI: The Application of Ontological Methods toward Coastal Restoration
AU: * Ramachandran, R
EM: rramachandran@itsc.uah.edu
AF: University of Alabama in Huntsville, 301 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, AL 35758, United States
AU: Movva, S
EM: smovva@itsc.uah.edu
AF: University of Alabama in Huntsville, 301 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, AL 35758, United States
AU: Hardin, D
EM: dhardin@itsc.uah.edu
AF: University of Alabama in Huntsville, 301 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, AL 35758, United States
AB: At the fall 2006 AGU meeting the Information Technology and Systems Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville debuted a tool for ontology based search and resource aggregation called Noesis. Since that time Noesis, with a new ontology for seagrass habitats in the Gulf of Mexico, has been utilized to support evaluations of potential seagrass restoration sites. The seagrass ontology was generated from a standard stressor conceptual model description for five species of seagrass common to the Northern Gulf of Mexico. Coupling the seagrass ontology with the existing atmospheric science ontology allowed scientists to locate and retrieve substantial information about the seagrass habitat as well as stressors that impact the habitat induced by climate change and short term atmospheric phenomena. A domain specific catalog of seagrass resources was constructed and an application ontology developed that mapped the keywords of the catalog to the combined (atmospheric and seagrass) ontologies of Noesis. Noesis uses domain ontologies to help the user scope the search queries to ensure that the search results are both accurate and complete. The domain ontologies guide the user to refine their search query and thereby reduce the user's burden of experimenting with different search strings. Semantics are captured by refining the query terms to cover synonyms, specializations, generalizations and related concepts. As a resource aggregator Noesis categorizes search results from different online resources such as education materials, publications, datasets, web search engines that might be of interest to the user. This presentation will give an overview of Noesis and describe how it has been applied to coastal restoration investigations.
DE: 0394 Instruments and techniques
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting