Building a Global Aquatic Resource Knowledge Base for Fisheries

Fisheries management is a complex task aiming to ensure the long-term sustainability of fish populations and the ecosystems they depend on. To achieve those goals, it is essential that the fisheries are described with precise and non-ambiguous information. Different agencies are reporting fisheries data by relying on several vocabularies or thesauri. Just indicatively, for the description of aquatic species, there are different official and widely used data sources that can be used. As a result, there are different identifiers or names for describing the same resource. In this paper, we describe the construction of a global aquatic resource knowledge base, which is the result of the integration of different data sources using semantic web technologies. By focusing on aquatic species, we show that the information provided by different data sources is complementary, and we provide a unified way for accessing them. We finally describe how the same process was adopted for other information domains as well.