ODP-DASHBOARD: Enhancing Marine Species Conservation in the South Atlantic through Linked Open Data Integration

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a Cloud-based dashboard called ODP-DASHBOARD (Ocean Data Platform), to manage information from the Marine Biodiversity domains and Oceanography. In this context, the Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm has emerged as a set of best practices for connecting, sharing and exposing data and knowledge. A central part of this paradigm are ontologies, which allow the definition of shared vocabularies and conceptual models that help integrate this information. These considerations provide a strong motivation to formulate a system that takes into account geospatial characteristics that can provide answers to questions such as the following: (i) How can we define spatial regions for our studies? (ii) How are species distributed in a given region? (iii) Given a particular georeference, what geographic region does it belong to? (iv) How to relate species occurrences to environmental variables within a specific region?. This system is composedof (i) Architecture; (ii) Conceptual model and (iii) Linked data set for exploitation through a SPARQL endpoint. The evaluation was carried out from two approaches, the first of which consists of validating the dashboard using real data extracted from Marine Biodiversity and Oceanography repositories and then validating the proposed conceptual model using competency questions. The second approach has to do with validation through case studies defined together with researchers from the Scientific and Technological Center (CENPAT-CONICET).