IGERT

Integrating Biospatial Information

The preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement will standardly involve communication between archeologists, biologists, geologists, GIS technicians, and atmospheric scientists. Information integration across these disciplines will succeed only if there are common frameworks for representing the types of entities in shared domains and common mechanisms for identifying and reasoning about specific instances of these types and the relations between them.

We propose an IGERT to train a future generation of integrative scientists in the development and use of theories and tools capable of addressing the problems of cross-disciplinary communication in all biospatial domains. These include the theories of ontology ? creating and disseminating common controlled vocabularies ? and the tools, including GIS tools, of instance-level reasoning. We will foster projects to apply and extend these tools to address new challenges of cross-disciplinary communication in a variety of biospatial domains at a variety of scales, environmental hazards, intelligence analysis, biodefense, epidemiology and public health.