EducaWood: A Semantic Web Application for Forestry Education

There are a few applications available for educational purposes in the forestry domain. These applications have significant limitations, including not exploiting existing biodiversity datasets, lacking flexible and consistent use of domain concepts, and generating annotations that are not easily shareable or reusable by other applications. In this paper, we introduce EducaWood, a novel Semantic Web application designed for forestry education that overcomes these limitations by leveraging Linked Open Data (LOD). Users can easily create tree annotations through a web form that hides the complexity of Semantic Web technologies. These annotations adhere to the Simple Tree Annotation ontology and are saved in a triplestore, facilitating seamless sharing with other users and applications. Moreover, EducaWood offers scalable and efficient visualization of semantic tree data across various zoom levels on a map interface. Access to LOD is handled through a REST API that allows read and writes operations over multiple data sources. An implementation of EducaWood has been successfully tested by more than 650 users, including real students and teachers in a pilot educational experience.