Increasingly, scientists and citizens are using the Web to contribute and interact with scientific data. This session will explore collaborative environments and social networks used by both professionals and citizens for exploring, discussing and contributing to the body of scientific knowledge and data. Such environments have great potential for enabling new collaborations to be formed and to extract more value from scientific data, but many technical and social challenges need to be faced.

Geoscientific information can be both rich and complex, and content is not always readily interpretable by either humans or machines. Interpretation of such information is important if it is to be shared, exchanged, integrated or used by advanced third-party applications as would be required in an interoperable context. Questions to be addressed may include: how meaning can be represented using ontologies or other semantic mechanisms; how representations of meaning can be used in an interoperable context to allow information to be shared; how representations of meaning can be used in applications (for example, for discovery and analysis); and how knowledge can be abstracted, interpreted and inferred from semantic representations and data and information repositories.