Semantic Web Methodologies: Facilitating the Design of a National Fisheries Data Exchange Standard

Fisheries and aquatic data collected through different organizations for a variety of purposes, often at local and regional levels, are all important for informing broader national and international scale management and research projects.  Creating a standard for fisheries data exchange is an important step toward enabling effective integration and reuse of these data for purposes beyond their original intent. Semantic Web methodologies and technologies are designed for the exchange and integration of heterogeneous data, and have informed the thinking behind the effort to create a national fisheries data exchange standard. By looking at Semantic Web standards and technologies, the national fisheries data exchange standard can provide benefits to the scientific community through a flexible model designed for rapidly evolving technical approaches and the ever increasing need for data of all shapes and sizes.