Ecosystems Monitoring: An Information Extraction and Event Processing Scientific Workflow

This paper presents a novel architecture that brings together Information Extraction (IE) with Event Processing (EP)research areas to globally monitor human activities and biodiversity dynamics and measure their impact on ecosystems. The two areas (IE and EP) are rich on their own and we believe their integration will achieve a much more comprehensive solution to ecosystems monitoring. The integration is based on a closed loop mechanism that guarantees the communication and the evolution of the overall architecture. While we use Microblogging communities (e.g., Twitter) as a news producing tool, we keep track of the vulnerable ecosystems using a GIS tracking database. We also make use of Google Map/Earth API capabilities to dynamically update the GIS database. After a complete cycle, the architecture produces a list of vulnerable ecosystems. This architecture leverages the rich research in Scientific Workflows to achieve the integration and communication of the various components. We are in the process of developing a system that can be used by conservationists and decision makers to efficiently allocate their time and limited resources in response to ecosystems perturbation.