A Framework for Interoperability and Decision Support in Marine Environmental Information Systems

This thesis focuses on the design and development of a framework for integration and interoperability between diverse information resources in the marine science domain. Researchers and scientists collect data and use it for monitoring and modelling the marine environment. Ocean and sea areas are exploited for a range of anthropogenic activities such as fisheries and dredging of aggregates for the building industry that generate large data sets. National and international legislation and agreements apply to these activities, the species that inhabit the seas and the marine ecosystem. Sustainable management and monitoring of sea areas therefore requires interoperable access to heterogeneous, autonomous data sets. The thesis examines these issues and discusses techniques for data integration and syntactic and semantic interoperability in the context of space, time and thematic dimensions. The framework addresses these problems using a knowledge base consisting of metadata objects, dimension related ontologies and domain or global ontologies. The research presented in this thesis uses a test bed of typical data sources to inform the design and illustrate the potential of the framework. Further information http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/zk/charm/home.htm.