Brazilian Cerrado: a case study of linked geographical and statistical data applied to Ecology

This paper describes an ontology network that will serve as the basis for publishing and linking data about wood plant communities of the Brazilian Cerrado biome, obtained from scientific studies, meteorological and environmental data and geographical information (maps). Data Cube, Meteorological, GeoSPARQL and Time ontologies were used as infrastructure 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 regimes. Datasets provided by Brazilian government agencies and those obtained from scientific literature, found in different formats, were transformed into RDF using Open Refine along with its RDF extension or, for shape files, using the geometry2RDF tool. A web-based application was deployed using Map4RDF, so as to provide a proper visualization of aggregated information, integrating map visualization using Google Maps API with ontology-based facet browsing. Ongoing work investigates possibilities of integrating these data with qualitative reasoning models. This research has potential to boost applications of linked geographical and statistical data technologies into ecological research and applications to conservation of biodiversity.