Providing Global Change Information for Decision-Making: Capturing and Presenting Provenance

Global change information demands access to data sources and well-documented provenance to provide evidence needed to build confidence in scientific conclusions and, in specific applications, to ensure the information’s suitability for use in decision-making. A new generation of Web technology, the Semantic Web, provides tools for that purpose.The topic of global change covers changes in the global environment (including alterations in climate, land productivity, oceans or other water resources, atmospheric composition and/or chemistry, and ecological systems) that may alter the capacity of the Earth to sustain life and support human systems [1].Data and findings associated with global change research are of great public, government, and academic