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.
RSS is a set of standards for syndication, providing metadata for news headlines, weblog entries, and so on. Of the plethora of RSS specifications, RSS 1.0 (http://purl.org/rss/1.0/) is an RDF vocabulary.
The Simple Knowledge Organization Scheme (http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/) is a Semantic Web framework for describing thesauri and controlled vocabularies.
SIMILE (http://simile.mit.edu/)is a project out of MIT that is building ties between digital libraries and the Semantic Web. Of special note is the Longwell RDF browser, which is a catalog browser using facets to navigate.
As part of CAIN's work in developing semantic web technologies we have been developing schemas and ontologies expressed in the web ontology language OWL. These include the following:
An extension to the biodiversity resources ontology describing California-specific resources
A representation of a portion of the California Wildlife Habitat Relationships database, including an ontology for the habitat relationships information, and instance data for amphibian habitat relationships in RDF/XML and N3 formats.
Ontologies from the SPIRE project describing invasive species lists and their relationships. These include the following:
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.
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[Image: Information Center for the Environment]
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.
The NBII Program is administered by the Biological Informatics Program of the U.S. Geological Survey
