Domain ontologies are a central component in the Virtuoso demonstrator, a system that captures, analyzes and aggregates open news sources in order to achieve an information position that supports complex decision processes in the context of border control. However, maintenance of such an ontology is a challenging task. We demonstrate a text processing pipeline that supports domain experts in maintaining the domain ontology. The system facilitates the maintenance by generating candidate concepts that should be added to the ontology. Some initial tests have been carried out with filtering candidate concepts from a domain specific news feed.

Climate Twins is a freely accessible Web application which provides easily comprehensible information on the projected climate developments in Europe at a regional level. Climate Twins is based on the idea that an impression of the future climate of a specific region can be received by indicating regions which have a similar present climate. Within the 7th EU FP project "TaToo" ontology-based functionalities have been added to the basic Climate Twins Web application in order to allow users to enrich the original information base - restricted to only two climate parameters ('temperature' and 'precipitation') - by themselves by adding any further geo-located information which they consider relevant in the context of a specific local climate (e.g. information on local vegetation and fauna). This kind of crowdsourcing information raises the problem of safeguarding the quality of the added information. In this paper the authors show how the domain ontology of Climate Twins can be used to semantically validate the coherence of new entries in order to prevent incorrect links.

During the past years huge amounts of resources in the environmental domain have been published on the internet. To facilitate search and discovery of relevant data among an ever increasing mass, the use of tags has been suggested. Yet, the use of non-formal tags for annotating resources allows simple categorization and search capabilities, but it does not provide the means to create cross-domain annotations. On the other hand, ontologies are a shared and formal conceptualization of a given domain and they can be used to formalise tags. The use of formal semantics for tagging allows taking advantage of the reasoning and inference power of the ontologies to create richer resource annotations enhancing the discovery process. In the environmental domain there is a clear need of frameworks and tools allowing formal tagging and discovery. In this paper we discuss about the definition of a Semantic Framework helping the tagging and discovery process of environmental resources. Moreover, we also report on the definition of a model to describe environmental resources allowing cross-domain annotation and search.

A Web Portal represents an entry point on the Inter net that allows users to access a centralized knowl edge and information repository. In the TaToo project the Web Portal is the entry point to the Tagging and Discov ery functionalities provided by the TaToo core framework. The aim is to supply a user front-end application which ad dresses user needs and that can be widely adopted across differe nt domains and different locations. Moreover, a Web Portal benefits from the Web ubiquity increasing the number of p ssible users or the number of contacts from the same user. The users through the TaToo Web Portal are able to perform semantic searches for resources, to semanti cally annotate resources and to evaluate already existing res ou ces or annotation associated with resources.