$1 million NSF Grant Awarded to Develop Open Knowledge Network

Two New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) professors are part of a consortium of 10 organizations that received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to use technology to assist agencies that manage wildfires, water quality and biodiversity.

Ying Wu College of Computing professors Xinyue Ye, Shaohua Wang and team will create what the NSF calls an "Open Knowledge Network" for spatial decision-support technologies. The goal is to create prototype tools and methods that will make it easier for machines to find and understand internet data, known as a semantic web, to help agencies make better decisions.

The semantic web uses tags to encode data on the internet so it can be more easily understood by machines, allowing computers to use reasoning for improved search results and answering questions. This is similar to what is currently used by Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.

“On top of the semantic web, we aim to build an AI-based question and answer system that automatically consolidates data sources from different channels and assist agencies in making better decisions,” Wang said.

Ye and Wang are part of a team of 13 researchers and practitioners. Other institutions in the project are Arizona State University,Conservation Biology Institute, ESRI, Geodesign Technologies, Mountain View Business Group, Portland State University, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science and USDA Forest Service.“This project brings together a team to focus on grand challenges of national importance and have a good chance of bringing a tangible benefit to society,” Ye said.

These resources will dramatically enhance organizational opportunities for developing use-inspired and knowledge-based spatial decision-support applications.

For example, diverse stakeholders will be able to address challenges with managing wildfire and forest fuels, such as those conditions that led to the Camp Fire in California, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history.

The Puget Sound Partnership, composed of more than 750 organizations working on the monitoring, cleanup, and recovery of Puget Sound ecosystem, will have access to digital resources that could reduce recovery costs, which in 2017 were estimated at $500 billion over the coming decades.

“Our work will advance research critical to the development of open knowledge networks through the combination and testing of participatory and automated ontology development processes. Three domain-specific case studies will build on participatory GIS and ontology development work through engagement of problem-focused stakeholder networks. At the same time, the utility of automated tools for resource discovery, ontology development, and social network analysis will be tested in these real-world problem environments. Through integration and comparison of these techniques, we will deliver insights into efficient and effective methods for Open Knowledge Network development,” Ye said.

The NSF grant funds phase 1 of the project. If the consortium is successful in its endeavors, the group could receive significant additional funding to continue the project. The grant was awarded through the NSF Convergence Accelerator program, which is designed to bring together interdisciplinary teams to address NSF’s focus on addressing large issues to benefit society. Topics to be addressed range from Harnessing the Data Revolution and molecular manufacturing, to tracking disrupting solar phenomena. Ye and Wang’s grant is one of 18 awarded so far through the program.