AquaDiva D01

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Image: Aqua Diva

Description

The Collaborative Research Centre AquaDiva (CRC 1076), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), focuses on the important roles of water (Aqua) and biodiversity (Diva) for shaping the structure, properties, and functions of the subsurface. This project aims to answer fundamental questions about the Earth’s Critical Zone (CZ) that begins below the highest density of plant roots (~0.3 meters) and extends down into the first aquifers (~100 meters): What biota live there? How do they interact with and reflect on their environment? and How do they reflect surface properties?

In cooperation with the research group of Prof. Dr. Udo Hahn (http://www.julielab.de/External link) we are responsible for the subproject INFRA 1 – semantic technologies for scientific data management and text mining. Taking into account the fact that scientific data today appear in a structured form (e.g. scientific databases, spreadsheets) and in an unstructured form (e.g. scientific publications, reports), our primary goal within INFRA1 is to make structured as well as unstructured data semantically homogeneous so that their diverse origins and heterogeneous formats are no longer obstacles to common use. Therefore, we will provide a commonly shared platform for the storage of and personalized access to the data produced by the other CRC AquaDiva subprojects (scientific data management). We will combine heterogeneous collections of structured data in a hitherto non-existing homogeneous way (data integration) in order to structure the information contained in unstructured publications and to provide a semantically transparent integration of both structured and (once) unstructured data (data interoperability). Our final goal is to supply researchers with a semantically driven scientific problem-solving platform that allows extensive semantic computing over integrated quantitative and qualitative data. This will allow researchers to derive novel facts and new evidence from the underlying data that take into account the data’s uncertainty, credibility, etc.

Please visit the official AquaDiva website for more information: http://www.aquadiva.uni-jena.de/