Project award: fishDelish

We are very pleased to have a strong role in the fishDelish Project awarded to the  University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science by the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC). Our co-partners in the project include FIN Inc, a not-for profit NGO that has created and runs FishBase, a 400M hit per annum species-specific database.

The project is aimed at three targets:

1. Putting a large portion of Fishbase’s relational data on the web as Linked Data triples. We anticipate, during the next nine months, putting more than 100M triples on the web. This has its own challenges, eg converting the relations we are generating (using R2D) with existing standards, making sure that copyright information is maintained, and not least of all, dealing with a large data-set.
2. Building basic species pages from linked data, and providing a self publishing mechanism for collection and aquarium data
3. Adding a live tutorial medium for SPARQL based on our open source iDoc documentation product

This project has been running for about a month, and we are making good progress with data conversion and have already constructed basic species tables from data in a triple store (we are using 4store with a custom Ruby on Rails front end for this).

The fishBase team consists of Bijan Parsia (UofM SCSc), Sean Bechhofer (UofM SCSc), Rainer Froese (IFM-GEOMAR and FIN Inc), Dave Workman (Hedtek) and Mark van Harmelen (Hedtek and UofM SCSc).

The fishDelish blog and project site can be found at http://fishdelish.cs.man.ac.uk