OceanGraph: Some Initial Steps Toward a Oceanographic Knowledge Graph

Abstract

Increasing ocean temperatures severely affects marine species and ecosystems. Among other things, rising temperatures cause coral bleaching and loss of breeding grounds for marine fish and mammals. Motivated by the need to understand better these global problems, researchers from all over the world generated huge amounts of oceanographic data during the last years. However, most of this data remain isolated in their own silos. One approach to provide safe accessibility to these silos is to map local, often database-specific identifiers, to shared global identifiers. This mapping can then be used to build interoperable knowledge graphs (KGs), where entities such as publications, people, places, specimens, environmental variables and institutions are all part of a single, shared knowledge space. This short paper describes one such effort, the OceanGraph KG, including the modeling and publication processes, and the current and prospective uses of the dataset.