  Socio-ecological System (SES) research studies the interaction between
environment, users, and governance of environment resources. Data produced
during the research cycle can be both long-tail (e.g. heterogeneous) and
longitudinal data. For example, the IFRI (International Forestry Resources and
Institutions) data set contains studies carried out over a period of 20 years.
Given the complexity of a SES system, case studies that are accumulated over
time and from different sites (e.g. site visit cases) are highly valuable in
the understanding of new SES system behavior for instance. We, as a group of
informatics researchers collaborating with personnel from the Workshop in
Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, are developing
informatics approaches to facilitating SES scholars' research.
  Here we focus on presenting our work on representing SES cases using
ontology. An ontology for the SES field can help organize concepts in the
field, describe resources such as data and publications using a shared
vocabulary, and also facilitate data use and query for researchers. We develop
a core SES ontology, which contains core concepts and resources in the field
and can be used to describe actual concept and resource instances, and also a
tool for contributing instances by drawing graphs, called Cmap2SES.
