Ornithology based on linking bird observations with weather data

Abstract

This paper presents the first results of a use case of Linked Data for eScience, where 0.5 million rows of bird migration observations over 30 years time span are linked with 0.1 million rows of related weather observations and a bird species ontology. Using the enriched linked data, biology researchers at the Finnish Museum of Natural History will be able to investigate temporal changes in bird biodiversity and how weather conditions affect bird migration. To support data exploration, the data is published in a SPARQL endpoint service using the RDF Data Cube model, on which semantic search and visualization tools are built.