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Abstract

Understanding and predicting the effect of climate change on coral reef ecosystems poses a significant challenge for environmental scientists. Investigations into marine ecosystems, such as the Great Barrier Reef, are generally undertaken by independent researchers and organisations resulting in a collection of isolated, disparate data sets.

By sharing and integrating relevant multidisciplinary data sets, researchers are able to detect new patterns and infer new knowledge about ecosystem processes across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. In order to fully understand and model the multiple, complex effects of climate change on coral reef ecosystems, scientists need to integrate observational and experimental data that includes: satellite imagery, oceanographic data (sea surface temperatures), weather data, fish and bird migratory and breeding patterns, water quality (chemical and nutrients) data and algal and coral species and distribution patterns. This presentation describes how the unique combination of eResearch, GoogleEarth / Maps and Semantic Web technologies are enabling scientists to query integrated datasets, conduct analyses across a range of different spatial and temporal scales and visualize these results.

 

About the speaker

Campbell Allen holds a Bachelor degree in Software Engineering and Data Communications from the Queensland University of Technology. He worked as a Software Engineer at the Centre for Marine Studies (CMS), University of Queensland (UQ) in a team that developed a web based scientific workflow system for remotely sensed oceanographic data processing. He is currently completing a research Masters degree in Software Engineering at UQ, which aims to integrate CMS researcher data sets using ontologies and to use this data in a system to query, analyse and visualize the results. This research project is being supervised by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Scarla Weeks at the Centre for Marine Studies and Jane Hunter at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at UQ. Campbell’s research interests include the semantic web and the use of ontologies for data integration, GIS systems for visualisation, the Google Web Toolkit and ExtJS for the rapid development Ajax applications.