The project aims to improve access to global oceans information, data and knowledge products for better management and sustainable development
The Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT Centre along with Derilinx, a linked and open data solutions company, have received an award from the UNESCO OceanInfoHub (OIH) project to build a semantic search engine and web portal. The award will allow researchers to develop a search portal that will work on top of an open knowledge graph of maritime / ocean data originally collected by the UNESCO OIH project for use by the company and the public.
The OIH is a three-year project funded by the Government of Flanders, Kingdom of Belgium, and implemented by the IODE Project Office of the IOC/UNESCO. It aims to make global oceans information more accessible for researchers and the public to support sustainable development, by designing a one-of-a-kind Global Hub Search Portal. This will allow existing and emerging ocean data and information systems, from any stakeholder, to interoperate with one another. The part of the project awarded to ADAPT is to help UNESCO build the OIH knowledge graph integrating various heterogeneous data sources worldwide and, together with Derilinx, deliver a semantic search portal that will be accessible on the web by researchers and the public.
Speaking about the project, ADAPT Centre researcher, Dr Fabrizio Orlandi said: “This is a very important project for us as, together with Derilinx, we have the opportunity to establish a fruitful collaboration with UNESCO, a well-known organisation with a wide spectrum of projects aiming to help people and the planet. At ADAPT we have experience on similar projects with different organisations in various domains – from multimedia to Irish history – but it makes us feel very proud to know that our knowledge graph technologies will be used to support researchers on sustainability, biodiversity and the environment.”
Overall, the OIH project will link and anchor a network of regional and thematic nodes that will improve online access to, and synthesis of existing global, regional and national data, information and knowledge resources. ADAPT’s capabilities in data management, semantic web technologies and knowledge graphs will help support the development of the Ocean Data and Information System (ODIS) architecture thereby, accelerating effective dissemination of digital technology, and sharing of ocean data, information and knowledge.
More about the OIH project. The ADAPT team includes: (i) Fabrizio Orlandi, senior postdoctoral researcher and project leader with experience on Open Data and Knowledge Graphs; (ii) Nishtha Jain, research engineer with experience in data science, NLP and ML modelling; (iii) Joris Vreeke, design and innovation lead in the dLab with UI and UX development expertise.
