Loose Integration of Local Information to Generate Collaborative Marine Science Knowledge

This chapter focuses on improved access to marine science data, enabling researchers to generate new information and knowledge products. The history of controlled vocabulary developments in marine sciences, from paper publications to the Semantic Web, is explored in detail. This history is being furthered through the publication of Linked Open Data, meaning: the publication of clearly identifiable entities; a simple, universal mechanism for retrieving resources; a generic graph-based data model; and publishing explicit relationships to other resources. Progress towards Linked Open Data for marine science is reported in this chapter. As shown by the Data-Information-Knowledge ecosystem, the approach of “small pieces of data loosely joined” provides presentation and organisation to data, which creates information. The use of query endpoints to integrate this information from multiple locations into a knowledge base, which required active collaboration between cooperative partners to truly generate new knowledge and to address emerging science questions, is described.