Internet of Things Garage

Semantic Data Integration For Forest Observatory

Semantic Data Integration Towards Forest Observatory based App Ecosystem


Poaching and animal trafficking are significant challenges around the world. Anti-poaching efforts are always underfunded and under-resourced. Law enforcement officers cannot keep up with the large number of poachers trying to kill and capture animals. Due to limited manpower, they cannot patrol and protect vast areas of land. We will semantically integrate data gathered by Bio-science researchers and environmental scientists to predict where the poaching activities will occur in the future. Our data-driven prediction models will tell areas and time frames that are highly likely to have poaching incidents. Therefore, law enforcement agencies can deploy their limited resources into those areas. This project will focus on the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, Sabah, Malaysia. This project collaborates between the School of Computer Science and the School of Biosciences (and its Danau Girang Field Centre; DGFC) at Cardiff University.

Our approach is to develop a Forest Observatory and develop data-driven predictive analytics to predict poaching incidents. Forest Observatory is a Linked Datastore that integrates heterogeneous data. Collecting data in forests is much more challenging than in cities due to the lack of infrastructure. However, while we expect to deploy an Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to enable poaching monitoring, we aim to utilise already collected data sets to develop predictive poaching models. For example, DGFC has data sets collected by researchers for wildlife species monitoring over the last decade, such as animal collar data, camera traps, satellite imagery, LiDAR and environmental data, with each data set generated using different time frames durations, geographic areas etc.


Team


Funding

EPSRC

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to universities in the United Kingdom.

Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)

The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) is part of the UK’s official development assistance (ODA). Its aim is to support cutting-edge research and innovation that addresses the global issues affecting developing countries.


Partners

Danau Girang Field Centre

Danau Girang is a collaborative research and training facility managed by Sabah Wildlife Department and Cardiff University.




Outcomes

Journal
Naeima Hamed, Omer Rana, Pablo Orozco-terWengel, Benoît Goossens, and Charith Perera, A Comparison of Open Data Observatories, ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ), Volume X, Issue X(X), pp XX, November 2024
Poster
Naeima Hamed, Omer Rana, Benoît Goossens,Pablo Orozco-terWengel, and Charith Perera, FOO: An Upper-Level Ontology for the Forest Observatory, In Proceedings of European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Satellite Events. ESWC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13998. Springer, Cham, pp 154--158
Journal
Naeima Hamed, Andrea Gaglione, Alex Gluhak, Omer Rana, and Charith Perera, Query Interface for Smart City Internet of Things Data Marketplaces: A Case Study, ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (TIOT), Volume 4, Issue 3, Article No: 19pp, 1–39