Public Welcome: SeaPedia
The DO system’s public content will be easy to find, comprehend, and reuse, through the DigitalOcean SeaPedia site. SeaPedia uses the best practices in semantic web design to craft a set of top pages based on an NSF funded concept flows for ocean education. The main sixty-four nodes on this map will each be expanded into one-page descriptions of the science topics. For example the node “A broad diversity of life evolved in the ocean and the broadest diversity of life still exists there” will be expanded to expose the contours of this diversity of life. Each of these top pages will be semantically linked to its neighbors in the concept flow and to the semantically related contents of the DO media and science collection. Each page will have its own Creative Commons license, crediting the work of those who contributed to its text, and also its own citation.

The initial authoring of the first set of nodes will be seeded through the work of a paid science writer. The task of elaborating the flow map fully and of updating each node will be taken on by the ECOSnet community. At the end of five years, this collection will be one of the finest ocean learning tools on the internet. Anyone looking for ocean science information whose search result lands on a SeaPedia page finds not only the information she wants, but also a learning pathway to a better understanding of the ocean environment.