Image: © Tamara Kulikova/Stock.adobe.com
Adapt and Derilinx are teaming up to improve access to ocean data in a bid to promote better management and sustainable development.
The Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Adapt Centre and open data company Derilinx have received a UNESCO award to build a search engine and web portal for ocean data.
It is part of UNESCO’s OceanInfoHub (OIH), a three-year project that began in 2020 to make global ocean data more accessible for researchers and the public. The goal is to allow both existing and emerging ocean data and information systems to interoperate and support sustainable development.
As part of the project, researchers at Adapt will help build the OIH knowledge graph, which will integrate various data sources from around the world.
Working with Dublin-based Derilinx, the team will build an accessible search portal for the public and researchers.
Derilinx tackles the challenges of sharing open data and internal data by helping public sector organisations generate high-quality clean data, which is then usable in research, innovation and other avenues.
“This is a very important project for us as, together with Derilinx, we have the opportunity to establish a fruitful collaboration with UNESCO,” Adapt researcher Dr Fabrizio Orlandi said.
“At Adapt we have experience on similar projects with different organisations in various domains – from multimedia to Irish history – but it makes us feel very proud to know that our knowledge graph technologies will be used to support researchers on sustainability, biodiversity and the environment.”
29 pilot partner organisations have been working with the OIH project to demonstrate proof-of-concept works for the planned Ocean Data and Information System (ODIS) architecture.
A back-end search demonstration site is being used for testing, while the global OIH search portal is expected to be completed next month.
It is expected that Adapt’s capabilities in data management, web technologies and knowledge graphs will help support the development of the OIH search portal architecture.
The OIH project is funded by the government of Flanders and implemented by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO.
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