SemSorGrid4Env Introductory Film Clips

The Southampton Contribution

In SemSorGrid4Env, linked data and web data combine to allow people and computers to find environmental information. For example, people locate weather data by web browsing using keywords. A computer finds this very difficult, and thus needs specialised techniques to know what is in a data repository and extract the right information. People sift and select information very effectively, but a computer needs specific software to achieve the same selective access to information. SemSorGrid4Env takes each data source and wraps it in a description that computers can understand. For this to happen, people worldwide should ideally use a standard language and description to describe things in an agreed way. This has traditionally been approached by using metadata, but even so in practice the required global standardisation is unachievable. So the semantic web approach employs common groups of descriptions which in effect link together different ways of describing an object – and this approach is based on ontologies. These are fixed and inter-linked groups of descriptors that can be applied across an information domain. For SemSorGrid4Env , specific existing ontologies have been chosen and used to mark up data sets semantically so that computers can find them and reason about them automatically far faster than a human web search. One emergent technology that can be managed in this way is wireless sensor networks, which are cheap but semi-intelligent data sources that can communicate between themselves and make decision about data. SemSorGrid4Env has experimented with integrating such networks into the information infrastructure. Mashups are then used to permit one data source to feed many different uses and applications.