Linked Environment Data - Getting Things Connected

After three years of discussion and early prototypes, the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), Germany, now has launched a two-year research & development project on Linked Environment Data (LED) with innoQ Deutschland GmbH as a contractor. This project will set up a core cloud of environment data with a well-elaborated domain terminology as its semantic backbone. Data will be taken from the “Environmental Specimen Bank”, the “German Metadata Portal on Soil” and further databases such as the “Joint Substance Data Pool of the German Federal Government and the German Federal States” as well as the environmental library and research databases. The infrastructure will support a sustainable process of keeping the data permanently up-to-date, and there will be a dynamic and intuitive user interface. All the work will be fully Semantic Web compliant, based on vocabularies such as SKOS, SCOVO or Data Cubes,