A survey of knowledge organization systems in environmental sciences

Abstract

There is an abundance of environmental information. It includes information that is being collected, processed and stored from various sources, such as climate and atmospheric data, data related to water quality and groundwater levels, or information on the diversity and productivity of delicate ecosystems. As this information is being continuously made available to various information management systems, it is an open challenge to effectively represent it, store it and organize it. To this end, Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) of the environmental domain have been introduced, trying to facilitate the analysis, search and reusability of such information. This paper tries to provide an introduction to environmental KOSs, by giving an overview of their current development. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.