Over the past fifteen years, ARIES has contributed to building a global digital commons for environmental sustainability, through both its semantic web platform and its annual intensive modelling school for scientists and policy analysts, the International Spring University (ISU) on Ecosystem Services Modelling.
Awareness of the importance of semantic-driven integration technologies and their role in achieving data and model reusability and interoperability has grown in parallel with global interest in the subject. Throughout these years, ARIES has contributed to this awareness not only through the k.LAB technology and its 2,000+ community of users around the world, but also through the Integrated Modelling Partnership, which brings together institutions contributing to designing and building a fully integrated information landscape.
Since its creation in 2007, the project has developed two AI-powered applications: the k.Explorer and the ARIES for SEEA Explorer. The first is an interface that allows non-technical users to run sophisticated models, and the ARIES for SEEA Explorer is a specialized application released last year on the UN Global Platform to accelerate the implementation of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) ecosystem accounting UN statistical standard worldwide.
Our team, led by Ikerbasque and BC3 Professor Ferdinando Villa, is proud to have developed a ground-breaking technology that is able to integrate independently produced data and models in the field of environmental sustainability – and most importantly, to be a project achieving data and model reusability and interoperability that has become one of the reference platforms of the open science movement.
Check out our second 15th-anniversary infographic now providing an overview of the main concepts and components that integrate k.LAB, as well as our first illustration highlighting the project’s aims for future years! You can also participate in our social media with #ARIES15years!
