Project website

Primary Investigator

Email

Institution

Villa, Ferdinando

villa@cbl.umces.edu

University of Maryland

Abstract
Understanding the dynamics of biological diversity requires new approaches and integration between different disciplines. The development of a unitary body of knowledge about biodiversity is made difficult by the fragmentation and lack of interoperability between the diverse - and often informal and simplistic - semantics adopted for data and models. Different representational paradigms require conceptual, as well as technical, integration to enable reorganizing the body of knowledge and enable new ideas, theories, and higher-level paradigms to surface and be tested. Building on software and conceptual frameworks being developed at IEE/UMD, we propose to develop and deploy a web-accessible database where temporally- and spatially- explicit biodiversity data will coexist with dynamic modular models, potentially integrating multiple modeling paradigms and automatically enforcing their compatibility. The XML-based infrastructure used by the underlying software engine will enable us to store data and models (modules) adopting an extensible array of representations, and to link them together transparently and automatically. The integration will happen through explicit cross-cutting abstractions called domains, which represent various aspects of the world (such as time or space) as seen by each module, and are processed by the simulation engine to resolve conflicts related to different scales or representational paradigms