Research support was provided by NSF, award NSF-ITR-IIS-0326460, PI Tim Finin, UMBC.

1. Approach We are building prototype tools and applications that demonstrate how semantic web technology supports infor-mation discovery, integration and sharing in scientific com-munities.  The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) and Invasive Species Forecasting System (ISFS) pro-vide requirements and serve as testbeds for our prototypes. Invasive species do more economic damage to the U.S. every year that all other natural disasters combined. Above: plants, animals, and a virus. SPIRE Semantic Prototypes in Research Ecoinfomatics • Significant Results • SWOOGLE - a search engine for the semantic web. • MoaM(Meal of a Meal) - Given a species list, infer a food web. • Photostuff - annotate regions of a picture with OWL. • SWOOP- the first ontology editor written specifically for OWL. • Ontologiesfor ecological interaction, and observation data. • Food web visualization and analysis tools that are driven by OWL ontologies and instance data. • CRISIS CAT - an RDF based catalog of Invasive Species resources in California. • Coordination with USGS, NASA, EPA, GBIF, and the Intergovernmental, Interagency Cooperation on Ecoinformatics. Spire is a distributed, interdisciplinary research project exploring how semantic web technology supports information discov-ery, integration, and sharing in scientific communities. We are building prototype tools and applications for inclusion in the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), with a focus on the early detection and warning of invasive species. Meal of a Meal (after Friend of a Friend). We know Fish 1 eats Plant 1. We then infer that Fish 1 may also eat the taxonomic siblings of Plant 1: Plants 2 and 3. Similarly, we infer that the taxonomic siblings of Fish 1 - Fishes 2 and 3 - may eat Plant 1. Swoogle is a crawler based search and retrieval system for semantic web doc-uments (SWDs) in RDF and OWL. It discovers SWDs and computes their metadata and relations, and stores them in an IR system. Users can search for ontologies or instance data, and hits are ranked according to our Ontology Rank algorithm. The RMBL team expresses food webs in OWL using an ontology for eco-logical interaction they have constructed in coordination with other ecolo-gists. The OWL model drives the simulation and visualization. • Broader Impacts • Enable knowledge from one community to be effectively used by another. • Harness the power of the citizen scientist. (The majority of invasives are discovered by amateurs.) • Integrate research and education in the classroom. • Coming Soon • ELVIS – an end to end application that starts with a location and produces a model of its food web. • The Pond Project - a junior high school classroom activity to monitor the health of local ecosystems. • Enhanced tools. Spatial distribution of exotic plants at the Cerro Grande fire site. The statistical techniques used to generate these maps do not take trophic data as input. Yet. An ontology (found via Swoogle) is loaded into Photostuff to mark up regions of a field photograph. Research Team UMBC ebiquity (Finin) UC Davis ICE (Quinn) UMBC GEST Center (Sachs) RMBL PEaCE (Martinez) UMD MINDSWAP (Hendler) NASA GSFC (Schnase) The NBII California Information Node (CAIN), maintained by UC Davis, is a jumping off point to broader NBII deployment. UMBC Research support was provided by NSF, award NSF-ITR-IIS-0326460, PI Tim Finin, UMBC. AN HONORS UNIVERSITY IN MARYLAND

3. Taxonomic Neighbors Fish 2 Fish 1 Fish 3 Plant 2 Plant 1 Plant 3 Taxonomic Neighbors