Ecoinformatics, or ecological informatics, is the science of information (informatics) in ecology and environmental science. It integrates environmental and information sciences to define entities and natural processes with language common to both humans and computers. However, this is a rapidly developing area in ecology and there are alternative perspectives on what constitutes ecoinformatics. Ecoinformatics characterise the semantics of natural system knowledge. For this reason, much of today's ecoinformatics research relates to the branch of computer science known as knowledge representation, and active ecoinformatics projects are developing links to activities such as the Semantic Web.