The semantic web and linked data for entomologists

Entomologists are confronted with a wealth of relevant data, but it is often difficult to pull all of it together in a useful way. New tools and techniques that are being developed for the Semantic Web can help deal with this information overload. The Semantic Web is a part of the larger World Wide Web. Semantic Web sites contain additional information that helps clarify the meaning of the information on a web page or web accessible resource.

The ability to clearly attach meaning to text and numbers has fostered the creation of a world-wide web of data. Data repositories that are linked to other data repositories in a standard way are part of the Linked Data Cloud. The Linked Data Cloud can be thought of as a large data set that spans repositories across the globe. A paper in PubMed may be linked to data in online specimen records. This online data can be used to link these specimens to the habitat and climate information for their collection locations. These specimens can also be linked to specific gene sequences in GenBank.

The Linked Data Cloud provides a rich set of information that can be queried and analyzed, and allows researchers to incorporate more related information into their analyses than they would have been able to collect and curate themselves.

The talk will provide an introduction to Semantic Web concepts and methods using data on the mosquito, Ochlerotatus triseriatus, from a number of Linked Data resources including GenBank, PubMed.