Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics - BDEI - Towards an Operational Semantics of Biological Diversity: Integrating Structure and Function in a Web-accessible Knowledge Base

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EIA-010931Villa, FerdinandoUniversity of Maryland Center for Environmental SciencesBDEI: Towards an Operational Semantics Diversity: Integrating StructureSummaryUnderstanding the dynamics of biological diversity requires new approaches andintegration between different disciplines. The development of a unitary body ofknowledge about biodiversity is made difficult by the fragmentation and lack ofinteroperability between the diverse - and often informal and simplistic - semanticsadopted for data and models. Different representational paradigms require conceptual, aswell as technical, integration to enable reorganizing the body of knowledge and enablenew ideas, theories, and higher-level paradigms to surface and be tested.Building on software and conceptual frameworks being developed at IEE/UMD, wepropose to develop and deploy a web-accessible database where temporally- andspatially- explicit biodiversity data will coexist with dynamic modular models,potentially integrating multiple modeling paradigms and automatically enforcing theircompatibility. The XML-based infrastructure used by the underlying software engine willenable us to store data and models (modules) adopting an extensible array ofrepresentations, and to link them together transparently and automatically. Theintegration will happen through explicit cross-cutting abstractions called domains, whichrepresent various aspects of the world (such as time or space) as seen by each module,and are processed by the simulation engine to resolve conflicts related to different scalesor representational paradigms.