Improving availability and utilization of forest inventory and land use map data using Linked Open Data

Abstract

Introduction: Modern forestry increasingly relies on the management of large datasets, such as forest inventories and land cover maps. Governments are typically in charge of publishing these datasets, but they typically employ disparate data formats (sometimes proprietary ones) and published datasets are commonly disconnected from other sources, including previous versions of such datasets. As a result, the usage of forestry data is very challenging, especially if we need to combine multiple datasets.

Methods and results: Semantic Web technologies, standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), have emerged in the last decades as a solution to publish heterogeneous data in an interoperable way. They enable the publication of self-describing data that can easily interlink with other sources. The concepts and relationships between them are described using ontologies, and the data can be published as Linked Data on the Web, which can be downloaded or queried online. National and international agencies promote the publication of governmental data as Linked Open Data, and research fields such as biosciences or cultural heritage make an extensive use of Semantic Web technologies. In this study, we present the result of the European Cross-Forest project, addressing the integration and publication of national forest inventories and land cover maps from Spain and Portugal using Semantic Web technologies. We used a bottom-up methodology to design the ontologies, with the goal of being generalizable to other countries and forestry datasets. First, we created an ontology for each dataset to describe the concepts (plots, trees, positions, measures, and so on) and relationships between the data in detail. We converted the source data into Linked Open Data by using the ontology to annotate the data such as species taxonomies. As a result, all the datasets are integrated into one place this is the Cross-Forest dataset and are available for querying and analysis through a SPARQL endpoint. These data have been used in real-world use cases such as (1) providing a graphical representation of all the data, (2) combining it with spatial planning data to reveal the forestry resources under the management of Spanish municipalities, and (3) facilitating data selection and ingestion to predict the evolution of forest inventories and simulate how different actions and conditions impact this evolution.

Discussion: The work started in the Cross-Forest project continues in current lines of research, including the addition of the temporal dimension to the data, aligning the ontologies and data with additional well-known vocabularies and datasets, and incorporating additional forestry resources.