NEON Workshop: Harmonizing eco-informatics approaches to facilitate data integration

There is a wealth of biodiversity and environmental data that can provide the basis for addressing global scale questions of societal concern. However, our ability to access and integrate this data is hampered by the lack of standardized languages and systems to make this information accessible through the Internet. New tools (e.g. ontologies, standards, integration tools, unique identifiers) are being developed that will move this process closer to establishing a framework for linked open data, but these tools are still nascent and require efforts in the biodiversity and environmental realm to bring to fruition, as has occurred in other domains (e.g. biomedicine).

With the right data modeling and tools, data assembly for ecological analysis purposes could be greatly simplified.  We propose to bring together ontology experts, informaticians, and data producers working across multiple projects and knowledge domains to tackle the challenge of providing consistently described and formatted data for immediate application in ecological analysis.  This working group will first work together to model phenology data products from continental-scale efforts (e.g. USGS, NEON and others) focusing on ways to assure linkability and discoverability. The group will then prototype development of a linked open data framework that vastly decreases the time needed to assemble heterogeneous data for use in ecological analyses at varying spatial scales.