In the 2012 President's Budget Request, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is terminated. As a result, all resources, databases, tools, and applications within this web site will be removed on January 15, 2012. For more information, please refer to the NBII Program Termination page.
The Information Center for the Environment at the University of California at Davis specializes in the development and dissemination of geospatial data and technologies; the development of robust data architectures dedicated to the cataloging of global environmental information; and the creation of decision support systems geared toward improving the capabilities of resource managers in a variety of sectors.
Informatics Research at CAIN
Two elements greatly assist in sharing environmental information: the use of controlled vocabularies for classifying content, and having environmental data and metadata be hosted in a distributed, local manner. As has long been recognized by librarians, using controlled vocabularies, thesauri, and web-based ontologies facilitates structured creation, search, and retrieval of information. Moreover, data owners and custodians often prefer maintaining close control over datasets and catalog information rather than diverting these to a centralized clearinghouse for outside access; developing mechanisms for distributed search and retrieval of data is therefore important.
Both of these elements are captured by the technologies emerging with the Semantic Web, and the informatics research at CAIN followed in this vein. Standard vocabularies such as Dublin Core are now commonly used, and the Semantic Web offers schema languages such as OWL and SKOS which allow communities to define their own local ontologies and vocabularies. In addition, protocols such as RSS, which is widely used for syndication, provide an excellent model to build upon for distributed retrieval of information.
Under an NSF-funded project called SPIRE, we have been working to develop schemas, thesauri, and other applications for the environmental Semantic Web. In addition, we have developed CRISISCat, a semantically-enabled catalog of invasive species information in California.
What is Semantic Web?
The semantic web is a development associated with the World Wide Web, in which the goal is to have universal meaning and understanding of services and information on the internet, so that computers can "understand" aspects of the Web that they currently do not. With further development of semantic web schemas, the need for humans operating computers to find, combine, and act upon web-based information will decrease.
CAIN Keyword Thesauri
CAIN uses the following controlled vocabularies and thesauri for cataloguing, search, and retrieval. Additionally, we provide thesauri marked up in machine-readable format for the Semantic Web, using the SKOS RDF vocabulary for describing thesauri, glossaries, taxonomies, and terminologies.
