Spire: Ontology



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Spire: Ontology

For the most part, the ontologies that we need in SPIRE already exist. That is, for most phenomena that we wish to describe via semantic markup, there exist standard terminologies and shared understandings of the underlying domains. Currently, these ontologies have not, for the most part, been formalized in OWL. A quick way to create an ontology is to simply define classes and proper\ ties in OWL with comments directing a reader to a published standard (official or de facto).

For example, the Invasive Species Data Service (one of the three components of the Invasive Species Forecasyting System ) creates merged data arrays consisting of the coordinates of a location where a particular species was found, followed by a host of attributes of that location (aspect, soil properties, distance to water, vegetation index, etc.). These merged data sets are valuable way beyond the scope of ISFS. So we want to automatically generate them in OWL, to make them findable and intelligible to software and human agents from other communities. But the parameters are not defined in any OWL ontologies. In many cases, they are not even officially defined by any standard body. However, many of the parameters are derived from the Digital Elevation Model according to formulas defined in the ESRI documentation. In other words, the ESRI documentation constitutes a de facto standard for properties like aspect, slope, etc. So we created a very simple ontology that defines all ISDS parameters as OWL properties of the OWL class "geolocation". OWL comments refer back to the ESRI documentation. Anyone wanting to use these common terms can refer to our ontology, and be understood to bbe using the terms in the same way ESRI uses them. Moving forward, we plan to work with ESRI to create a more robust ontology. But the advantage of our "down and dirty" approach is that we do not have to wait for the completion of the ontology to create and share instance data.

The general procedure that we are advocating is

Make a list of all the terms you need to mark up your instance data, and decide if they are owl:Classes, owl:ObjectProperties, or owl:DatatypeProperties. Hint: you will typically have a small number of Classes, and a bunch of DatatypeProperties.
Work with a ridiculously simple template (eg http://spire.umbc.edu/ontologies/isds.owl ), or use an editor like SWOOP.
Insert owl:comments that refer to the URLs of the official or de facto standards that define the terms that you have just introduced.
At any point, contact jsachs@umbc.edu for help.

References:
Lifestyle of a Casual Web Ontology Development Process


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