HR: 0830h
AN: U41B-0016    [PDF]
TI: Hydrologic Ontology for the Web
AU: * Bermudez, L E
EM: leb27@drexel.edu
AF: Drexel University, 3210 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 United States
AU: Piasecki, M
EM: mp29@drexel.edu
AF: Drexel University, 3210 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 United States
AB: This poster presents the conceptual development of a Hydrologic Ontology for the Web (HOW) that will facilitate data sharing among the hydrologic community. Hydrologic data is difficult to share because of its predicted vast increase in data volume, the availability of new measurement technologies and the heterogeneity of information systems used to produced, store, retrieved and used the data. The augmented capacity of the Internet and the technologies recommended by the W3C, as well as metadata standards provide sophisticated means to make data more usable and systems to be more integrated. Standard metadata is commonly used to solve interoperability issues. For the hydrologic field an explicit metadata standard does not exist, but one could be created extending metadata standards such as the FGDC-STD-001-1998 or ISO 19115. Standard metadata defines a set of elements required to describe data in a consistent manner, and their domains are sometimes restricted by a finite set of values or controlled vocabulary (e.g. code lists in ISO/DIS 19115). This controlled vocabulary is domain specific varying from one information community to another, allowing dissimilar descriptions to similar data sets. This issue is sometimes called semantic non-interoperability or semantic heterogeneity, and it is usually the main problem when sharing data. Explicit domain ontologies could be created to provide semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information communities. Domain ontologies supply the values for restricted domains of some elements in the metadata set and the semantic mapping with other domain ontologies. To achieve interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web, metadata is expressed using Resource Description Framework (RDF) and domain ontologies are expressed using the Ontology Web Language (OWL), which is also based on RDF. A specific OWL ontology for hydrology is HOW. HOW presents, using a formal syntax, the main concepts of hydrologic data and the semantic mappings with other domain ontologies. Using the RDF model and syntax so-called agents, or other specific applications, are able to transverse the domain ontologies and perform semantic queries providing "intelligent results" from heterogeneous information systems.
UR: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~leb27/research.html
DE: 0910 Data processing
DE: 1800 HYDROLOGY
DE: 1899 General or miscellaneous
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
SC: U
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting