C. Project Description C. 1 Introduction

The Driving Application

We choose the Adaptive Management Areas of the Pacific Northwest as our specific application domain because of their stated mission to experiment with and disseminate the lessons learned from innovative forest management practice. Its history of promoting partnerships with all interested stakeholders, including private landowners, environmental groups, public agencies, and concerned citizens provides a rich testbed for this project. The results of Adaptive Management Area activities are intended to contribute substantially to the achievement of sustainable forestry practices, for both public and private lands. The ten Adaptive Management Areas are shown in Figure 3.

The Solution

We will build a forest information portal that preserves the autonomy and local focus of each site using the Internet as the medium for the underlying base information. We will develop a superimposed layer of information, without disturbing the base information, that supports: (1) meaningful access to information using application-relevant terminology, with relationships among terms, presented in an easy-to-use, web-based system and (2) user-created, value-added information that elaborates, organizes, and annotates base information. The superimposed layer will accommodate new base information, new terminology and relationships among terms in order to respond to the ever-changing issues of prime importance concerning our forests.²

C.3 Research Objectives

Our research objectives are presented in Table 1. The high-level objectives describe the basic nature of information access that we must provide. Given the overwhelming success of the web in making information easy to create and easy to use, the time is at hand to provide open access to information for all interested parties, without requiring knowledge of proprietary formats or systems. The overwhelming challenge for this work is to provide useful access to information so that relevant information is easily found when it exists. Our work will be integrated with related local, regional, national, and international efforts and will use relevant standards to promote semantic integration with other forest information and to exploit general-purpose tools. Our work begins and ends with the objective of meeting the needs of the broad range of stakeholders in forestlands, the users of the Adaptive Management Portal.

The research objectives for the technical work, shown in the middle section of Table 1, seek to articulate and understand the nature of superimposed information. We see superimposed information as an important paradigm for modeling and accessing information. Superimposed information has been with us for centuries, in the form of concordances and commentaries but the technology associated with the web enables the easy use and reuse of various forms of superimposed information. For this work, we investigate two forms of superimposed information: the use of terminology, including relationships of interest to the user community among the terms, as a browsable, multi-granularity index and the use of user-supplied, value-added structures to highlight, organize, and comment on base information.

The primary research question is to determine how the features and complexity of the superimposed model influences the browsing, navigating, and querying capability through the superimposed layer. Our work is complementary to existing web-based or other search technology. In that the greatest impact of our work will be through its widespread adoption and use, we investigate the premise that the integration of superimposed information is easier than full integration of base information because it is simpler in structure and less detailed (as it serves to elaborate, not replace, the base information). We also consider the challenge of referencing base information at multiple levels of granularity. We must move beyond and within the borders of a single web page to provide useful access.

Table 1: Research Objectives
High-level objectives	Provide open access to all parties interested in the land, including private citizens.
	Provide easy-to-use access.
	Provide useful access (to find relevant information when it’s there).
	Understand how government data is used and how use of data can be facilitated.
	Coordinate with related local, regional, national, and international efforts.
	Accommodate the needs of the diverse user base for forest information.
	Use proposed, existing, and de facto standards (for content, classification, and technology).
Objectives for the conceptual approach (for superimposed information)	Explore the use of terminology (e.g., ontology) with relationships among terms as a browsable index.
	Explore the capability to define and exploit templates for user-supplied, value-added information.
	Investigate the tradeoff between model features (terminology and structured templates) vs. the accompanying capability to browse, navigate, query, and search the underlying information.
	Investigate the premise that superimposed information is easier to integrate than the underlying information.
	Investigate the impact of addressing information at multiple levels of granularity (e.g., to reference a paragraph, a section, a document) on the model and the user interface.
Objectives for design & experimental deployment	Provide a low-cost system (for contributing information, for providing access, and for maintenance).
	Provide a scalable system (to support substantial increases in base and superimposed information and users).
	Provide an extensible system (that accepts new base information, terms, relationships, and annotation with links to base information without requiring any change to the system).
	Build a decentralized, web-based system to support local autonomy of participants.
	Systematically and periodically evaluate the project, including a field test in graduate-level ecology classes.

Our ultimate goal for the Adaptive Management Areas is the deployment of a portal that serves as a model for national and international efforts. Towards that end, we investigate the scalability and performance of our technology based on superimposed information and we insist that our system be inexpensively maintained, decentralized, Internet-based, and extensible. The objectives associated with the experimental deployment are shown in the bottom of Table 1. Finally, because of the importance of meeting user needs we must evaluate the project and the utility of the resulting technology.