Proceedings of the Twenty-First Australasian Computing Education Conference
A recent ITiCSE working group argued the need to explicitly inform students of the academic integ... more A recent ITiCSE working group argued the need to explicitly inform students of the academic integrity requirements that apply when they are writing computer programs. The working group proposed a wheel-like diagram that might be used for this purpose and provided some examples to illustrate its use. Three universities in Australia have adopted the principle of informing their students about academic integrity in programming assessments, but have each taken a different approach to doing so. This paper reports on the three different approaches and explains why each was chosen.
Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference
The development of ontologies is traditionally a process of building vocabularies and understandi... more The development of ontologies is traditionally a process of building vocabularies and understanding complexities of a specific domain to link data and infer knowledge. However, this method does not always include the domain experts throughout the entire development process. This paper presents a Co-design framework as a structured methodology for ontology design and development. The framework, known as the Co-Designing Ontologies Methodology (C-DOM), presents a strategy to draw knowledge from the Subject Matter Expert (SME) without the SME needing to know any-thing about how to create an ontology. The C-DOM framework outlines a series of workshops that align to the layers of the Semantic Technologies architecture and has been developed via an iterative design process and tested in different domains with different levels of complexity and purpose. The first iteration focused on the creation of a light-weight ontology to link generic data in the incident and accident. The next iteration built a heavyweight ontology that included complex inference and reasoning within the urban water management domain. This paper describes the C-DOM in detail for re-use within the Semantic Technologies community and outlines its iterative development process undertake.1
Personalisation plays a vital role in the engagement of adult learners in online learning environ... more Personalisation plays a vital role in the engagement of adult learners in online learning environments. Historically, research has focused on applying adaptive technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, without integrating those technologies within teaching and learning approaches. Academagogy is a teaching and learning approach that allows an educator to select appropriate parts from the models pedagogy (educator-centred), andragogy (learner-centred), and heutagogy (learner-driven) for better learning outcomes. Previous studies used academagogy in face-to-face learning contexts; however, academagogy's application has been limited in online learning contexts. This paper presents our interim observations of applying academagogy to an online Information Technology course. Using mixed methods to analyse learner self-reflections, online learning analytics, learner grades, learner surveys, and learner interviews, we observed that learners progressed along the PAH continuum towards andragogy and heutagogy, with some exceptions. The exceptions were found where learners regressed on the PAH continuum when they encountered problems. The exceptions provide insights into the problem areas that block learner engagement and achievement, laying a foundation for future work in personalising the online learning experience.
Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, 2019
Most co-design-based Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research is conducted with children and does ... more Most co-design-based Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research is conducted with children and does not involve the participants directly. Studies have shown that people with ASD can take on the co-designer role in early phases of the software design process. We present a longitudinal study that investigates how adolescents with ASD participate as co-designers in an iterative software design process. In this work, we conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussion and drawings. Our findings suggest that: (1) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in supporting a longitudinal ASD co-design study and (2) adolescents with ASD are also able to make better design decision over an iterative software design process. These findings should to be considered when engaging adolescents with ASD as co-designers in a software design process.
Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Computing Education Conference on - ACE '18
Design Thinking (DT) is a required skill of computing graduates according to the Australian Infor... more Design Thinking (DT) is a required skill of computing graduates according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA). However, according to the 2016 AIIA work ready skills survey there is a job-ready skills gap between the industry expectations of design thinking skills and the ICT graduate capabilities in Australia. Design thinking applies methods that focus on problem-solving, ideating, and iterating in small bursts with continual feedback from users/stakeholders. This paper describes how an Australian university has embedded DT into the core of a Bachelor of Information Technology degree in a way that not only scaffolds DT skill sets across the three-year degree but creates a culture of design thinking. This DT 'strand' involves a two-day sprint that includes every year level as a mixed cohort. This paper presents the implementation of the DT strand and the industry-driven two-day sprint.
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Computer, Electrical, Automation, Control and Information Engineering, 2013
Improvements in the data fusion and data analysis phase of research are imperative due to the exp... more Improvements in the data fusion and data analysis phase of research are imperative due to the exponential growth of sensed data. Currently, there are developments in the Semantic Sensor Web community to explore efficient methods for reuse, correlation and integration of web-based data sets and live data streams. This paper describes the integration of remotely sensed data with web-available static data for use in observational hypothesis testing and the analysis phase of research. The Semantic Reef system combines semantic technologies (e.g., well-defined ontologies and logic systems) with scientific workflows to enable hypothesis-based research. A framework is presented for how the data fusion concepts from the Semantic Reef architecture map to the Smart Environment Monitoring and Analysis Technologies (SEMAT) intelligent sensor network initiative. The data collected via SEMAT and the inferred knowledge from the Semantic Reef system are ingested to the Tropical Data Hub for data di...
Cross-disciplinary collaborations potentially offer the diversity of understanding required to an... more Cross-disciplinary collaborations potentially offer the diversity of understanding required to answer complex problems. However, barriers to cohort discovery exist because content about people is predominantly only in human-readable form on websites and/or in disparate databases. Notably, many cross-disciplinary collaborations never form due to a lack of awareness of cross-boundary synergies. This project applies semantic technologies to automate linkages to reveal hidden connections between people from metadata parameters about data, rather than from publication products. The information in metadata, commonly used for data discovery, can be used to link researchers for potential partnerships. The proposed system combines pre-existing and custom ontologies, populated from a number of accessible repositories, to describe the relationships between researchers based on metadata parameters. The system was tested from the researcher's perspective where significant alignments with pot...
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, 2014
Proprietary sensor network systems are typically expensive, rigid and difficult to incorporate te... more Proprietary sensor network systems are typically expensive, rigid and difficult to incorporate technologies from other vendors. When using competing and incompatible technologies, a non-proprietary system is complex to create because it requires significant technical expertise and effort, which can be more expensive than a proprietary product. This paper presents the Sensor Abstraction Layer (SAL) that provides middleware architectures with a consistent and uniform view of heterogeneous sensor networks, regardless of the technologies involved. SAL abstracts and hides the hardware disparities and specificities related to accessing, controlling, probing and piloting heterogeneous sensors. SAL is a single software library containing a stable hardware-independent interface with consistent access and control functions to remotely manage the network. The end-user has near-real-time access to the collected data via the network, which results in a cost-effective, flexible and simplified sys...
Linking data and data fusion are important processes in knowledge discovery in all areas of resea... more Linking data and data fusion are important processes in knowledge discovery in all areas of research. However, there are massive amounts of scientific data being produced that cannot be effectively processed to its full potential. Sensed data is prolific and growing, so improvements in the data fusion and data analysis phase of research are becoming increasingly necessary. We describe the integration of remotely sensed data from the Smart Environmental Monitoring and Analysis Technologies (SEMAT) initiative with static data available from the Tropical Data Hub (TDH) for use in hypothesis testing in the Semantic Reef system. SEMAT is developing new sensor network technologies and processing methodologies for environmental applications. The TDH is an open data collaborative model where the data and metadata is exposed for discovery and publication. Data from the TDH is available for integration with other datasets such as live data streams from SEMAT for multi-disciplinary hypotheses....
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2021
Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. ... more Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. This study developed a social networking platform based on the needs of a small group of ASD adolescents and their parents/carers and examined what potential benefits such a system could provide. We conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussions and drawings. The findings suggest that: (1) participants demonstrated self-advocacy skills through an iterative co-design process; (2) a safe and familiar environment encourages active participation from adolescents with ASD as co-designers; and (3) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in engaging adolescents with ASD on a social-network.
Remote control access to the sensors while in the field and visualisation of the sensed data are ... more Remote control access to the sensors while in the field and visualisation of the sensed data are vital requirements for both terrestrial and marine-based wireless sensor network deployments. The maintenance of these networks includes travelling to the remote sites to check for damage or to reconfigure equipment which often involves significant expense and sometimes dangerous conditions. The ability to visualise sensed data is important during and post deployment, for quality assurance and/or to discover trends. Most user interfaces are specific to the sensor network they are designed for and practitioners are continually duplicating the basic methods and code for each deployment. This paper presents a web-based user interface developed as part of the Smart Environmental Monitoring and Analysis Technologies (SEMAT) project. The interface is designed to be generic in that it offers portal functionality and visualisation for any environmental sensor network regardless of the underling ...
The Semantic Reef project is an eco-informatics application that aims to combine multiple environ... more The Semantic Reef project is an eco-informatics application that aims to combine multiple environmental datasets to test ecological hypotheses and to derive information about environmental systems. The intention is to develop an automated data processing, problem-solving and knowledge discovery system that will assist in developing our understanding and management of coral reef ecosystems. Remote environmental monitoring (including sensor networks) is being widely developed and used for collecting real-time data across widely distributed locations. As the volume of raw data increases, it is envisaged that bottlenecks will develop in the data analysis phases, where current data processing procedures still involve manual manipulation that will soon become unfeasible to manage. Research communities, such as the Semantic Web and Knowledge Representation fields, aim to address this "data deluge", through the development of the automated data synthesis technologies and use-case ...
The transfer rate of messages in distributed sensor network applications is a critical factor in ... more The transfer rate of messages in distributed sensor network applications is a critical factor in a system's performance. The Sensor Abstraction Layer (SAL) is one such system. SAL is a middleware integration platform for abstracting sensor specific technology in order to integrate heterogeneous types of sensors in a network. SAL uses Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) as its connection method, which has unsatisfying transfer rates, especially for streaming data. This paper analyses different connection methods to optimize data transmission in SAL by replacing RMI. Our results show that the most promising Java-based connections were frameworks for Java New Input/Output (NIO) including Apache MINA, JBoss Netty, and xSocket. A test environment was implemented to evaluate each respective framework based on transfer rate, resource usage, and scalability. Test results showed the most suitable connection method to improve data transmission in SAL JBoss Netty as it provides a performan...
The Tropical Data Hub (TDH) is a virtual research environment that provides researchers with an e... more The Tropical Data Hub (TDH) is a virtual research environment that provides researchers with an e-research infrastructure to congregate significant tropical data sets for data reuse, integration, searching, and correlation. However, researchers often require data and metadata synthesis across disciplines for cross-domain analyses and knowledge discovery. A triplestore offers a semantic layer to achieve a more intelligent method of search to support the synthesis requirements by automating latent linkages in the data and metadata. Presently, the benchmarks to aid the decision of which triplestore is best suited for use in an application environment like the TDH are limited to performance. This paper describes a new evaluation tool developed to analyze both features and performance. The tool comprises a weighted decision matrix to evaluate the interoperability, functionality, performance, and support availability of a range of integrated and native triplestores to rank them according ...
Corporate social responsibility is a paramount concept in today's competitive lodging industr... more Corporate social responsibility is a paramount concept in today's competitive lodging industry due to climate change. Hotels were second to hospitals in their negative environmental impacts because they attribute 75% of the lodging industries environmental impact due to the consumption of energy, water and non-durable goods (Bohdanowicz and Martinac, 2003). To remain competitive, organizations need to implement green lodging programs to demonstrate social responsibility. There is a need for additional research on sustainable practices in lodging in the United States. This research is especially important in areas such as South Florida where tourism is imperative to the economy and climate change has the most impact (Nicholls and Kang, 2012; Rahman, et al., 2012; Myung, et al., 2012; Richins and Scarinci, 2009; Bohdanowicz, 2005; Leslie, 2007; Pizam, 2009; Mensah, 2006; Chen, et al., 2005; Erdogan and Baris, 2007). Environmental training of employees, green messaging in promotion...
The Semantic Reef project is an application of eco-informatics and represents the first time that... more The Semantic Reef project is an application of eco-informatics and represents the first time that semantic tools have been applied to the study of coral reef ecosystems. It aims to develop a platform that combines emerging Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and Grid Computing technologies to make unconnected datasets computer-understandable. The key goal is to improve our capacity to generate timely warnings of environmental conditions that are conducive to coral bleaching. The Semantic Reef model is a tool for hypothesis-driven research and problem-solving methods, which will allow for the maintenance and analysis of disparate data streams. The initial validation exercise, to test the accuracy of the model using sea surface temperature and community composition datasets (both static and dynamic data), is presented. It is the unequivocal scientific consensus that climate change is a great threat to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The efforts described here represent an eco-i...
Proceedings of the Twenty-First Australasian Computing Education Conference
A recent ITiCSE working group argued the need to explicitly inform students of the academic integ... more A recent ITiCSE working group argued the need to explicitly inform students of the academic integrity requirements that apply when they are writing computer programs. The working group proposed a wheel-like diagram that might be used for this purpose and provided some examples to illustrate its use. Three universities in Australia have adopted the principle of informing their students about academic integrity in programming assessments, but have each taken a different approach to doing so. This paper reports on the three different approaches and explains why each was chosen.
Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference
The development of ontologies is traditionally a process of building vocabularies and understandi... more The development of ontologies is traditionally a process of building vocabularies and understanding complexities of a specific domain to link data and infer knowledge. However, this method does not always include the domain experts throughout the entire development process. This paper presents a Co-design framework as a structured methodology for ontology design and development. The framework, known as the Co-Designing Ontologies Methodology (C-DOM), presents a strategy to draw knowledge from the Subject Matter Expert (SME) without the SME needing to know any-thing about how to create an ontology. The C-DOM framework outlines a series of workshops that align to the layers of the Semantic Technologies architecture and has been developed via an iterative design process and tested in different domains with different levels of complexity and purpose. The first iteration focused on the creation of a light-weight ontology to link generic data in the incident and accident. The next iteration built a heavyweight ontology that included complex inference and reasoning within the urban water management domain. This paper describes the C-DOM in detail for re-use within the Semantic Technologies community and outlines its iterative development process undertake.1
Personalisation plays a vital role in the engagement of adult learners in online learning environ... more Personalisation plays a vital role in the engagement of adult learners in online learning environments. Historically, research has focused on applying adaptive technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, without integrating those technologies within teaching and learning approaches. Academagogy is a teaching and learning approach that allows an educator to select appropriate parts from the models pedagogy (educator-centred), andragogy (learner-centred), and heutagogy (learner-driven) for better learning outcomes. Previous studies used academagogy in face-to-face learning contexts; however, academagogy's application has been limited in online learning contexts. This paper presents our interim observations of applying academagogy to an online Information Technology course. Using mixed methods to analyse learner self-reflections, online learning analytics, learner grades, learner surveys, and learner interviews, we observed that learners progressed along the PAH continuum towards andragogy and heutagogy, with some exceptions. The exceptions were found where learners regressed on the PAH continuum when they encountered problems. The exceptions provide insights into the problem areas that block learner engagement and achievement, laying a foundation for future work in personalising the online learning experience.
Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, 2019
Most co-design-based Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research is conducted with children and does ... more Most co-design-based Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research is conducted with children and does not involve the participants directly. Studies have shown that people with ASD can take on the co-designer role in early phases of the software design process. We present a longitudinal study that investigates how adolescents with ASD participate as co-designers in an iterative software design process. In this work, we conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussion and drawings. Our findings suggest that: (1) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in supporting a longitudinal ASD co-design study and (2) adolescents with ASD are also able to make better design decision over an iterative software design process. These findings should to be considered when engaging adolescents with ASD as co-designers in a software design process.
Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Computing Education Conference on - ACE '18
Design Thinking (DT) is a required skill of computing graduates according to the Australian Infor... more Design Thinking (DT) is a required skill of computing graduates according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA). However, according to the 2016 AIIA work ready skills survey there is a job-ready skills gap between the industry expectations of design thinking skills and the ICT graduate capabilities in Australia. Design thinking applies methods that focus on problem-solving, ideating, and iterating in small bursts with continual feedback from users/stakeholders. This paper describes how an Australian university has embedded DT into the core of a Bachelor of Information Technology degree in a way that not only scaffolds DT skill sets across the three-year degree but creates a culture of design thinking. This DT 'strand' involves a two-day sprint that includes every year level as a mixed cohort. This paper presents the implementation of the DT strand and the industry-driven two-day sprint.
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Computer, Electrical, Automation, Control and Information Engineering, 2013
Improvements in the data fusion and data analysis phase of research are imperative due to the exp... more Improvements in the data fusion and data analysis phase of research are imperative due to the exponential growth of sensed data. Currently, there are developments in the Semantic Sensor Web community to explore efficient methods for reuse, correlation and integration of web-based data sets and live data streams. This paper describes the integration of remotely sensed data with web-available static data for use in observational hypothesis testing and the analysis phase of research. The Semantic Reef system combines semantic technologies (e.g., well-defined ontologies and logic systems) with scientific workflows to enable hypothesis-based research. A framework is presented for how the data fusion concepts from the Semantic Reef architecture map to the Smart Environment Monitoring and Analysis Technologies (SEMAT) intelligent sensor network initiative. The data collected via SEMAT and the inferred knowledge from the Semantic Reef system are ingested to the Tropical Data Hub for data di...
Cross-disciplinary collaborations potentially offer the diversity of understanding required to an... more Cross-disciplinary collaborations potentially offer the diversity of understanding required to answer complex problems. However, barriers to cohort discovery exist because content about people is predominantly only in human-readable form on websites and/or in disparate databases. Notably, many cross-disciplinary collaborations never form due to a lack of awareness of cross-boundary synergies. This project applies semantic technologies to automate linkages to reveal hidden connections between people from metadata parameters about data, rather than from publication products. The information in metadata, commonly used for data discovery, can be used to link researchers for potential partnerships. The proposed system combines pre-existing and custom ontologies, populated from a number of accessible repositories, to describe the relationships between researchers based on metadata parameters. The system was tested from the researcher's perspective where significant alignments with pot...
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, 2014
Proprietary sensor network systems are typically expensive, rigid and difficult to incorporate te... more Proprietary sensor network systems are typically expensive, rigid and difficult to incorporate technologies from other vendors. When using competing and incompatible technologies, a non-proprietary system is complex to create because it requires significant technical expertise and effort, which can be more expensive than a proprietary product. This paper presents the Sensor Abstraction Layer (SAL) that provides middleware architectures with a consistent and uniform view of heterogeneous sensor networks, regardless of the technologies involved. SAL abstracts and hides the hardware disparities and specificities related to accessing, controlling, probing and piloting heterogeneous sensors. SAL is a single software library containing a stable hardware-independent interface with consistent access and control functions to remotely manage the network. The end-user has near-real-time access to the collected data via the network, which results in a cost-effective, flexible and simplified sys...
Linking data and data fusion are important processes in knowledge discovery in all areas of resea... more Linking data and data fusion are important processes in knowledge discovery in all areas of research. However, there are massive amounts of scientific data being produced that cannot be effectively processed to its full potential. Sensed data is prolific and growing, so improvements in the data fusion and data analysis phase of research are becoming increasingly necessary. We describe the integration of remotely sensed data from the Smart Environmental Monitoring and Analysis Technologies (SEMAT) initiative with static data available from the Tropical Data Hub (TDH) for use in hypothesis testing in the Semantic Reef system. SEMAT is developing new sensor network technologies and processing methodologies for environmental applications. The TDH is an open data collaborative model where the data and metadata is exposed for discovery and publication. Data from the TDH is available for integration with other datasets such as live data streams from SEMAT for multi-disciplinary hypotheses....
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2021
Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. ... more Adolescents with ASD face challenges in forming positive friendships due to their ASD condition. This study developed a social networking platform based on the needs of a small group of ASD adolescents and their parents/carers and examined what potential benefits such a system could provide. We conducted seven co-design workshops with six adolescents with ASD over eight months. The team exchanged ideas and communicated through group discussions and drawings. The findings suggest that: (1) participants demonstrated self-advocacy skills through an iterative co-design process; (2) a safe and familiar environment encourages active participation from adolescents with ASD as co-designers; and (3) parents, community group and fellow participants play a pivotal role in engaging adolescents with ASD on a social-network.
Remote control access to the sensors while in the field and visualisation of the sensed data are ... more Remote control access to the sensors while in the field and visualisation of the sensed data are vital requirements for both terrestrial and marine-based wireless sensor network deployments. The maintenance of these networks includes travelling to the remote sites to check for damage or to reconfigure equipment which often involves significant expense and sometimes dangerous conditions. The ability to visualise sensed data is important during and post deployment, for quality assurance and/or to discover trends. Most user interfaces are specific to the sensor network they are designed for and practitioners are continually duplicating the basic methods and code for each deployment. This paper presents a web-based user interface developed as part of the Smart Environmental Monitoring and Analysis Technologies (SEMAT) project. The interface is designed to be generic in that it offers portal functionality and visualisation for any environmental sensor network regardless of the underling ...
The Semantic Reef project is an eco-informatics application that aims to combine multiple environ... more The Semantic Reef project is an eco-informatics application that aims to combine multiple environmental datasets to test ecological hypotheses and to derive information about environmental systems. The intention is to develop an automated data processing, problem-solving and knowledge discovery system that will assist in developing our understanding and management of coral reef ecosystems. Remote environmental monitoring (including sensor networks) is being widely developed and used for collecting real-time data across widely distributed locations. As the volume of raw data increases, it is envisaged that bottlenecks will develop in the data analysis phases, where current data processing procedures still involve manual manipulation that will soon become unfeasible to manage. Research communities, such as the Semantic Web and Knowledge Representation fields, aim to address this "data deluge", through the development of the automated data synthesis technologies and use-case ...
The transfer rate of messages in distributed sensor network applications is a critical factor in ... more The transfer rate of messages in distributed sensor network applications is a critical factor in a system's performance. The Sensor Abstraction Layer (SAL) is one such system. SAL is a middleware integration platform for abstracting sensor specific technology in order to integrate heterogeneous types of sensors in a network. SAL uses Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) as its connection method, which has unsatisfying transfer rates, especially for streaming data. This paper analyses different connection methods to optimize data transmission in SAL by replacing RMI. Our results show that the most promising Java-based connections were frameworks for Java New Input/Output (NIO) including Apache MINA, JBoss Netty, and xSocket. A test environment was implemented to evaluate each respective framework based on transfer rate, resource usage, and scalability. Test results showed the most suitable connection method to improve data transmission in SAL JBoss Netty as it provides a performan...
The Tropical Data Hub (TDH) is a virtual research environment that provides researchers with an e... more The Tropical Data Hub (TDH) is a virtual research environment that provides researchers with an e-research infrastructure to congregate significant tropical data sets for data reuse, integration, searching, and correlation. However, researchers often require data and metadata synthesis across disciplines for cross-domain analyses and knowledge discovery. A triplestore offers a semantic layer to achieve a more intelligent method of search to support the synthesis requirements by automating latent linkages in the data and metadata. Presently, the benchmarks to aid the decision of which triplestore is best suited for use in an application environment like the TDH are limited to performance. This paper describes a new evaluation tool developed to analyze both features and performance. The tool comprises a weighted decision matrix to evaluate the interoperability, functionality, performance, and support availability of a range of integrated and native triplestores to rank them according ...
Corporate social responsibility is a paramount concept in today's competitive lodging industr... more Corporate social responsibility is a paramount concept in today's competitive lodging industry due to climate change. Hotels were second to hospitals in their negative environmental impacts because they attribute 75% of the lodging industries environmental impact due to the consumption of energy, water and non-durable goods (Bohdanowicz and Martinac, 2003). To remain competitive, organizations need to implement green lodging programs to demonstrate social responsibility. There is a need for additional research on sustainable practices in lodging in the United States. This research is especially important in areas such as South Florida where tourism is imperative to the economy and climate change has the most impact (Nicholls and Kang, 2012; Rahman, et al., 2012; Myung, et al., 2012; Richins and Scarinci, 2009; Bohdanowicz, 2005; Leslie, 2007; Pizam, 2009; Mensah, 2006; Chen, et al., 2005; Erdogan and Baris, 2007). Environmental training of employees, green messaging in promotion...
The Semantic Reef project is an application of eco-informatics and represents the first time that... more The Semantic Reef project is an application of eco-informatics and represents the first time that semantic tools have been applied to the study of coral reef ecosystems. It aims to develop a platform that combines emerging Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and Grid Computing technologies to make unconnected datasets computer-understandable. The key goal is to improve our capacity to generate timely warnings of environmental conditions that are conducive to coral bleaching. The Semantic Reef model is a tool for hypothesis-driven research and problem-solving methods, which will allow for the maintenance and analysis of disparate data streams. The initial validation exercise, to test the accuracy of the model using sea surface temperature and community composition datasets (both static and dynamic data), is presented. It is the unequivocal scientific consensus that climate change is a great threat to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The efforts described here represent an eco-i...
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