Semantic wiki in environmental project management

Abstract

Advanced management of environmental data requires appropriate metadata and tooling. Moreover, contemporary environmental data is heterogenous, encompassing also data about people, environmentaly-related projects, and documents. Also geographical- and time-related information are vital for any environmental data and should be supported. To satisfy these requirements, "semantic wikis" represent suitable tools but usually requiring knowledge management skills. In this paper, we present a semantic extension to project-management tool Trac, enabling advanced but user-friendly querying in semantic data stored in the system and its visualization. As it builds upon the general concept of RDF-based semantic data, it can be freely extended into other contexts and deployed in various environmental management applications. We also discuss automatic formal visualization of semantic data. Such process significantly lowers the requirements on users in preparing the visualization in domains like environmental studies - and also helps to build Linked Data-aware and better human-readable interfaces of semantic data repositories. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.