Can AI Techniques Be Applied to Forest Science Data Integration Problems

A workshop meeting was held December 17-18, 2006 at the Center for Tropical Forest Science to discuss database technology and forest science. Approximately twenty botanists participated in the meeting, representing twelve research organizations that collect data from seven plots or surveys from around the world. At the meeting we discussed technical issues, such as how to share existing schemas, how to integrate and share data, and how to represent botanical taxonomies. A number of the data requirements and possible solutions that were discussed at the meeting are briefly described in this paper. The objective of this paper is to explore whether current semantic web tools can provide practical solutions for integrating, representing, and sharing heterogeneous data sources.