April 26, 2006
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IST Results (04/04/06)
Researchers in Europe have achieved most of their aims in developing tools for analyzing inland water data at a local, national, and Pan-European level, but current technology prevented them from reaching their overall vision. The Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water (EDEN-IW) project sought to provide tools for accessing inland water data across European Union countries, regardless of the different databases, software, languages, data formats, and concepts of specific terms used by governments down to individual researchers. The EDEN-IW project, funded by IST, developed special software agents to "translate" a query so that all databases are accessed simultaneously, and used open standards. In addition to XML, EDEN-IW used OWL, the protocol for developing ontologies. "In the laboratory we got the software working across a variety of different platforms, using different software in different languages, so we have a working prototype," says Dr. Palle Haastrup, coordinator of the project and a researcher at the Joint Research Center's Institute for Environment and Sustainability. The project also sought to provide tools for analyzing data sets, inferring missing data, and modeling different scenarios, as well as to apply their work to other areas of environmental research. Although security and other issues prevent the tools from being released, the project has impacted the European Water Framework, which seeks to align data across the EU to create a common method for comparing information.
For the complete article see http://istresults.cordis.lu/index.cfm/section/news/tpl/article/ID/81326/BrowsingType/Features
Posted by rab5 at 09:15 PM
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