MODELLAZIONE E PUBBLICAZIONE DI DATI RELATIVI ALLA BIOVERSITÀ PER IL SEMANTIC WEB

Biodiversity knowledge is becoming a key factor for addressing many of the major environmental issues of the last decades. Hence, providing highquality and globally integrated biodiversity-related data is one of the main challenges of the future. Our project, in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, aims to contribute to this goal by enhencing and capitalizing French biodiversity knowledge. The cornerstone of this work is TAXREF, the French taxonomic register for flora and fauna. In the first part, we propose a web application, based on Semantic Web technologies, to help biologists curate biodiversity data, by comparing TAXREF with third-party web portals and data aggregators, highlighting disagreements and lacks of information. This work is based on an idea initially developed during my graduation project (PFE), that is further extended to provide a more effective and efficient solution. Then, we show the improvements achieved. The second part concerns the publication of TAXREF in the Web of Data, in order to enable its world-scale integration with data provided by many other international projects. It includes defining a model to represent the information in TAXREF following the Linked Data principles and producing a machine-processable version of it: TAXREF-LD. This process has been initiated within a previous project, which handled the publication of taxonomic data. We extend this model to encompass data related to geographical locations, bibliographic references, multi-lingual vernacular names and statuses. Finally, we evaluate the characteristics of the proposed model.