EducaWood: a Semantic Web Application for Forestry Education

Tracking #: 3952-5166

Authors: 
Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo
Juan I. Asensio-Pérez
Miguel L. Bote-Lorenzo
Pablo García-Zarza
José M. Giménez-García1
Felipe Bravo1
Irene Ruano

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors Education 2024

Submission type: 
Application Report
Abstract: 
There are few applications available for educational purposes in the forestry domain. These applications have significant limitations, including not exploiting existing biodiversity datasets, lacking flexible and consistent use of domain concepts, and generating annotations that are not easily shareable or reusable by other applications. In this paper, we introduce EducaWood, a novel Semantic Web application designed for forestry education that overcomes these limitations by leveraging Linked Open Data (LOD). Users can easily create tree annotations through a web form that hides the complexity of Semantic Web technologies. These annotations adhere to the Simple Tree Annotation ontology and are saved in a triplestore, facilitating seamless sharing with other users and applications. Moreover, EducaWood offers scalable and efficient visualization of semantic tree data across various zoom levels on a map interface. Access to LOD is handled through a REST API that allows read and write operations over multiple data sources. An implementation of EducaWood has been successfully tested by more than 650 users, including real students and teachers in a pilot educational experience.
Full PDF Version: 
Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 04/Dec/2025
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

I would like to thank the authors for making a rather major revision in their manuscript.

I recommend acceptance of the paper, provided the authors address the following points for the camera-ready:

1. Ontology publication and prefix correction.
The ontology should be published under a stable URI (e.g., w3id.org). In addition, Table 1 should be reorganized to include one prefix per ontology, rather than separate prefixes for individual classes. The current presentation is not aligned with best practices for Semantic Web publications.

2. Clarification of provenance in Figure 1.
Figure 1 should indicate which classes and properties originate from which ontologies. This will make the ontology structure more transparent and support reuse by other researchers.

3. Discuss limitations of the ontology and Semantic Web aspects.
The manuscript would benefit from an explicit discussion of the limitations of the current ontology (e.g., incomplete coverage of certain tree types or ecological concepts), or using URIs that are no longer supported from other domains, such as from https://datos.iepnb.es/def/sector-publico/medio-ambiente , and https://crossforest.eu/ifn2/ontology , and the broader limitations of the Semantic Web approach taken in the system. This will help situate the work more clearly within the Semantic Web research landscape.

Minor comments:
- see [77] => as shown/documented in Larrieu et. al [77].

Review #2
By Chris Davis Jaldi submitted on 04/Feb/2026
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

Third Review for EducaWood: a Semantic Web Application for Forestry Education

Review #1
- Reviewer Concern: explaining who identified the requirements (Section 3.1), and how. It would be useful to report whether these are the minimum requirements and, if so, why. Furthermore, as the requirements seem to be a fundamental component of the application development, it would be insightful to include a table mapping the requirements to the ontology elements.
- My Comments on revision: Addressed sufficiently with explicit mapping to respective detailed tables with more info.

- Reviewer Concern: adding, in Sections 2.1 to 2.4, a short paragraph or a few words after the presentation of the related works regarding their comparison with the current work. Also, I would argue that page 5, lines 37-43 do not belong in the related works section.
- My Comments on revision: Addressed. Added new summative paragraph; Restructured the old last paragraph to the respective (Section 3) position.

- Reviewer Concern: splitting Section 3, "Design of EducaWood", into two sections one about the design and data aspects (i.e. "Design of EducaWood"), and one about the usage of the application (i.e. "Usage of EducaWood"). Currently, the two elements are mixed, which hinders the clarity of the manuscript. Additionally, I would appreciate seeing a usage scenario of the application that corresponds to the learning objectives of forestry education of Section 1 page 1, lines 46-49 and page 2, lines 1-5.
- My Comments on revision: Addressed with explicit connection with the previous use case, along with broader details illustrating the functionality, etc

- Reviewer Concern: converting the website footnotes into bibliography items (i.e. @misc), especially the repeated ones.
- My Comments on revision: Addressed. The new version shows them as references now.

- Reviewer Concern: adding more explanation in the Table 1 description in the manuscript regarding the purposes of the chosen domains.
- My Comments on revision: Partially addressed. More details on the specific purpose of the prefix have been added.

- Reviewer Concern: Minor Comments on Presentation (Abbreviations, language use, and styling choice for annotations, etc.)
- My Comments on revision: Addressed

Review #2
- No Concerns from Review 2.