DOLCE ROCKS: Integrating Geoscience Ontologies with DOLCE

Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration

Volume

Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration

Contents

Conceptual representations are being developed within many geoscience domains to aid semantic-enabled scientific computing, e.g. geology, geophysics, hydrology, marine science, planetary science. These representations often make different ontological assumptions, causing their integration to be impeded. This is particularly problematic for science issues that involve cross-domain knowledge, such as those related to climate change, biodiversity, and hazards risk. Emerging foundational ontologies have the potential to alleviate this problem by providing a coherent and complete conceptual basis for domain representations. In this paper we present work-in-progress in which the DOLCE foundational ontology is used to integrate two geoscience knowledge representations, the GeoSciML schema and SWEET ontology, to enable cross-domain scientific computing. The preliminary results indicate good conceptual coverage by the foundational ontology, minimal conflict and overlap between the domain ontologies, alternative approaches for aligning with the foundational ontology, and several issues with the domain and foundational ontologies. An OWL-DL encoding is in progress and testing via data integration is planned.