Applying semantics in the environmental domain : The TaToo project approach

The EU FP7 TaToo project major aim is to bridge the resource discovery gap. This is a well know proble m regarding, firstly, the difficulty of discovering resourc es available on the Web, secondly, the access and p ossibly the ‘visualisation’ of these resources once discovered. TaTo o is trying to solve the problem through a framewor k (based on semantic concepts) able to store in a knowledge bas e, meta-information (or metadata) associated with r esources. Meta-information is then used by TaToo during the res ource discovery process. Meta-information is provid ed by end users while discovering resources or by resource ow ners and, as stored in a triplestore, it consists o f RDF triples made of Domain Ontologies concepts. Meta-information knowledge base makes possible, together with a re asoner, a resource model for annotation, and a set of Domain Ontologies, a semantically-enhanced resource discovery process. The paper briefly shows the TaToo architecture focu sing on the description of those components dealing with semantics. Then, it shows how semantics has been impleme nted, giving details on the Minimal Environmental Resource Model (MERM) and on the process of integrating Domain Ontologies to realise the ontology framework use d in TaToo.