AUTHOR=Giménez-García José M. , Vega-Gorgojo Guillermo , Ordóñez Cristóbal , Crespo-Lera Natalia , Bravo Felipe 

TITLE=Improving availability and utilization of forest inventory and land use map data using Linked Open Data

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Forests and Global Change

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2024.1329812

DOI=10.3389/ffgc.2024.1329812

ISSN=2624-893X

ABSTRACT=Modern forestry increasingly relies on the management of large datasets, such as forest inventories and land cover maps. Governments are typically in charge of publishing these datasets, but they typically employ disparate data formats (sometimes proprietary ones) and published datasets are commonly disconnected from other sources, including previous versions of such datasets. As a result, the usage of forestry data is very challenging, especially if we need to combine multiple datasets.Semantic Web technologies, standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), have emerged in the last decades as a solution to publish heterogeneous data in an interoperable way.They enable the publication of self-describing data that can easily interlink with other sources.The concepts and relationships between them are described using ontologies, and the data can be published as Linked Data on the Web, which can be downloaded or queried online. National and international agencies promote the publication of governmental data as Linked Open Data, and research fields like biosciences or cultural heritage make an extensive use of Semantic Web technologies.