Rappresentare Ricercatori e Istituti del Progetto RITMARE nel Web Semantico

The Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) of the RITMARE Flagship Project is aimed at conflating the distinct contributions to Italian marine research. In implementing the infrastructure, a pivotal element is the representation of Researchers and Institutes. For a seamless integration with the heterogeneous context information involved (controlled vocabularies, gazetteers, metadata), we employed the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) data schema, which is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the data format underlying the Semantic Web. On the one hand, this kind of representation allows to relate Researchers with the respective Institutes, to detail these entities, and to express their mutual relationships. On the other, it is possible to integrate these data structures with the wider context of the Semantic Web, particularly with the resources made available as Linked Data, a recent paradigm for protocol-neutral access to resources. In this paper, we describe this representation methodology and outline its advantages for the creation of the web-based tools that the RITMARE sub-project 7 is developing for both front- and back-end functionalities.