Environmental information enrichment - The TaToo approach

Difficult to find, difficult to understand! Can we trust this information? How reliable are these data? Would these data or model serve my needs? Uncountable questions are now being raised by numerous end users, after the result of their search query returned some (or tons) of information on the web. TaToo tries to improve the success rate for reliable and understandable results on the web by a new and promising approach. TaToo is developing a semantic framework providing tools and services for information enrichment and discovery of environmental resources based on a service-oriented and semantically enhanced architecture. Having available semantic descriptions of environmental resources clearly facilitates the search and discovery of information, as semantics provide "meaning" to items, and allows the search engine to go beyond simple statistical searches, which often return unrelated hits. But this needs a lot of meta-information and semantic information someone would have to enter. The gap between the need for semantics and its general availability is what TaToo is addressing. TaToo facilitates the annotation of environmental resources by providing tagging tools and services so that related to the user's domain and expertise they could enter (tag, comment, rate, etc.) a specific item from the world wide information pool. At the same time TaToo offers discovery tools and services based on the previously entered semantic annotation, thus allowing to return to the user search results improved with quality, uncertainty and ranking information. TaToo relies on specially developed resource and semantic models, the Minimum Environmental Resource Model, called MERM, and the usage of bridge ontologies, in order to realize semantic interoperability between different environmental domains. Combined with several multilingual aspects TaToo will be able not only to cross-link information stemming from one language area but also from different ones. This paper describes the architecture and the ontology framework of TaToo, then it details how we address interoperability issues using the MERM model and bridge ontologies; finally it describes the user interaction with the TaToo framework, describing the TaToo portal as the TaToo entry point.