Since 2020 the VLIZ Marine Data Centre, in its pursuit of FAIR and Open Data, has been gradually implementing Semantic Web Technology techniques, libraries and frameworks to help grow the «Research Knowledge Graph».
In this we are working with our various reference systems, which we have been managing and providing to the marine community for decades. We are now exposing those reference systems using standard linked-data techniques, and this will open them up to a wider community of users, from single researchers to automated queries (e.g. web-searches, harvesters, etc).
Through this work, we can provide important, linkable references that can help classify, order, fragment and thus identify, cluster, compare and analyse linked concepts, be they general (such as discovery metadata for datasets) or specific (such as actual data-points within datasets).
With this overview we want to give a general sense of the available linked-open-data we help produce.
marineinfo.org
MarineInfo.org exposes the various entities from VLIZ’s IMIS (Integrated Marine Information System) as linked-open-data. The IMIS catalogues cover datasets, publications, people, institutes and projects.
More information can be found in this service description
marineregions.org
The Gazetteer MarineRegions.org maintains the list of named and identified geographical regions for a practical use in scientific research. These so-called GeoObjects are exposed as linked-open-data, including the relations between them and their geometries.
A thorough description and motivation of its development and workings can be found in Lonneville et al..
A practical description of the available uri-templates for the individual GeoObject representations and the LDES fragmentation of the full dataset can be found under this webservices description
marinespecies.org (coming soon!)
The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is a taxonomic database that aims to provide an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms.
Through our participation in the MareGraph project we are preparing the linked-open-data publication of this important reference.