Automating semantic metadata collection in the field

Abstract

In the past few decades, the field of ecology has grown from a collection of disparate researchers who collected data on their local phenomenon by hand, to large projects fueled by automated sensor networks that rely on sharing data to answer questions of extraordinary scale and complexity. Semantic technologies offer many opportunities for better data management in ecology, but also pose a challenging learning curve to already busy researchers. This paper presents a mobile application for recording semantic metadata about sensor network deployments in real time, in the field, and with no prior knowledge of semantics. This application enables more efficient and less error-prone metadata collection, and generates structured and shareable metadata in seconds.