Using the Semantic Web to Support Ecoinformatics

We describe our on -going work in using the semantic web in support of ecological informatics, and demonstrate a distributed platform for constructing end - to -end use cases. Specific ally, we describe ELVIS (the Ecosystem Location Visualization and Information System), a suite of tools for constructing food webs for a given location, and Triple Shop, a SPARQL query interface which allows scientists to semi - automatically construct distr ibuted datasets relevant to the queries they want to ask. ELVIS functionality is exposed as a collection of web services, and all input a nd output data is expressed in OWL, thereby enabling its integration with Triple Shop and other semantic web resources.