Observing observations - an ontology-based approach for improving the reliability of biodiversity data

The Envirofi program aims to provide methods for gathering, managing and offering real-time environmental information on mobile devices and computers. The project seeks to develop methods for combining heterogeneous information from scattered sources and to enhance the assurance of data. A huge amount of biodiversity data is produced with different vocabularies and terminologies. This hinders data integration. We approach the problem from a semantic point of view by developing ontology models that enable the harmonising of biodiversity-related information in order to improve the quality of the data.