Our Tools

The top need we identified from our work with landscape collaboratives is for sharing basic information about People, Projects, Organizations and their Products (PPOp). To that end we built a semantic data structure (an ontology) that facilitates sharing and interrelating these types of data across organizations. We have a journal article that describes the research, and the ontology with some sample data from the Puget Sound region are available on our Github repository.

The Geographic Information Science (GIS) Knowledge Graph integrates 5 GIS bodies of knowledge to enhance search over a literature database with over 500,000 GIS publications. We have a journal article that describes the research, and the code and data for the tool are available on this Github repository.

From our work with the Santa Barbara County Regional Priority Plan to Reduce Wildfire Risk, we created a prototype knowledge graph for People, Projects and Expertise using the commercial platform kgbase.com.

Our work with landscape collaboratives has shown that participants readily understand and appreciate semantic web concepts and data structures, but the available tools for working with these structures are too complex. Landscape collaboratives also extensively use geographic data, which is not well supported in semantic tools. This has led us to begin development of an app (Geographic Information-Linked Data Explorer) that provides a simple interface for browsing and editing semantic data (RDF format), as well as basic geographic information systems (GIS) search and display.

We are developing a gateway API for queries and data acquisition, which would allow for the definition of external data sources to query and a method to initiate crawling of these external sources. For external users and services, the API allows for a discrete number of searches that can be performed against one or more ontologies. These include initiating spatial queries, temporal queries, semantic queries, and free-text queries.

This product would allow the creation, running, and tracking of complex workflows for semantic and geospatial data. In Phase II, these workflows will be made available to all the subsystems and also be exposed to end users via our other client products and via our Decision Support Query API. These workflows will honor any security system for data that is used by the system. From this tool, the end user will be able to view any manually made workflow within the system as well as viewing the dynamic workflows.

A Webspace Creator tool will allow users to publish their knowledge graph / geospatial workspaces as a shareable web portal. Portals may either be private or public, and will allow broader audiences to browse and search the information.

With our Collaborative Decision Workbench, people and groups will be empowered to use our individual tools collectively. This will help them share and create information, develop workflows that transforms data to knowledge, and leverage these capacities to build the decision support applications that help us collaboratively make the hard choices we need to build a better future.