HR: 0800h
AN: IN51A-0314    [Abstracts]
TI: Development of a Controlled Vocabulary for Hydrology
AU: * Beran, B
EM: bb63@drexel.edu
AF: Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadlephia, PA 19104
AU: Piasecki, M
EM: Michael.Piasecki@drexel.edu
AF: Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadlephia, PA 19104
AU: Choi, Y
EM: yrc22@drexel.edu
AF: Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadlephia, PA 19104
AB: The recent emergence of a number of Environmental Observing systems calls the for the need of a nationwide geoscience cyberinfrastructure. One of the problems that need to be overcome when building a nationwide CI is the vexing problem of disparate and incompatible metadata descriptions that exist due to the use of different standards (if at all) and also the use of different vocabularies to describe the same thing or multiple use of a single word to describe different things leading to interoperability problems. To avoid syntactic interoperability problems many data clearinghouses (UK's Gigateway, Canada's GeoConnections, Australian Spatial Data Directory, US NSDI etc.) are migrating to ISO 19115 metadata standard. While the adoption of a standard is a first step towards solving the syntactic interoperability problem to some extent semantic difference remain because the ISO 19115 does not provide any controlled vocabulary for scientific terminology. In this study our aim is to develop a thesaurus for hydraulic science (as it is a central subject of all environmental observing systems) and engineering keywords that consists of several thousand entries which will help solving homonym, synonym problems as well as allowing discovery of more specific terms when a broader term was searched for. Development methods allow multi-lingual controlled vocabulary as in ISO standard since the relations (classification, narrower term, broader term, synonym etc.) between the terms in the thesaurus are independent of the language used. Human readable vocabulary may be attached to concepts as labels with a "language" identifier such that an entry of e.g. n0231 returns "rain" in English while "pluie" in French.
DE: 0525 Data management
DE: 0599 General or miscellaneous
DE: 1819 Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005