ASLO Poster, June 2006

The American Society of Limnologist and Oceanographers (ASLO) summer meetings were held in Victoria, British Columbia, from June 4-9, 2006. At this meeing, David Waetjen presented a poster on the Semantic Online Data Access (SODA) module which will be incorporated into this website and will be used as the primary data access method.

Poster Abstract

There is currently no accepted standard for the exchange of data for lakes and other freshwater environments which can seamlessly integrate into various web and analytical services. We are creating an open source based framework and repository for the collection, storage, and dissemination of environmental data related to global freshwater habitats. At present, we are focusing on limnetic environments in three pilot locations as part of the World Water and Climate Network (WWCN). Our data repository includes Lake Biwa, Japan, Lake Geneva, Switzerland, and Castle Lake, USA. The mission of the WWCN is to build a global lake data repository and to leverage open technologies allowing scientists to perform comparative analyses at multiple scales. Our efforts are centered on the semantic web, a collection of open standards, to express data for better accessibility and meaningful integration with other limnological work worldwide. These methods are now being integrated into the California Information Node of the National Biological Information Infrastructure, providing access to a broad spectrum of environmental data. We discuss our strategy, experiences, and interim results as the basis for future collaboration.