Contaminant Hydrogeology Knowledge Base (CHKb) of Georgia, USA

Hydrogeologists collect data through studies that originate from a diverse and growing set of instruments that measure, for example, geochemical constituents of surface and groundwater. Databases store and publish the collected data on the Web, and the volume of data is quickly increasing, which makes accessing data problematic and time consuming for individuals. One way to overcome this problem is to develop ontology to formally and explicitly represent the domain (e.g., contaminant hydrogeology) knowledge. Using OWL and RDF, contaminant hydrogeology ontology (CHO) is developed to manage hydrological spatial data for Georgia, USA. CHO is a conceptual computer model for the contaminant hydrogeology domain in which concepts (e.g. contaminant, aquifer) and their relationships (e.g. pollutes) are formerly and explicitly defined. Cyberinfrastructure for exposing CHO and datasets (i.e., CHKb) as Linked Data on the Web is developed. Cyberinfrastructure consists of storing, managing, querying, and visualizing CHKb that can be accessed from URL: cho.gsu.edu

The Volcanism Ontology (VO): Semantic Modeling of Volcanic Eruptions and Volcanoes

We have modeled the complex material and process entities and properties of volcanic eruptions and structures in the Volcanism Ontology (VO) applying several top-level ontologies such as Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), SWEET, and Ontology of Physics for Biology (OPB) within a single framework. The upper level framework separates the entities into investigative and volcanism entities, and each further separated into their own BFO framework. This allows for VO to be one of the best steps towards a domain ontology to cover the complexity found in volcanology. When deployed on the web, VO will be used to explicitly and formally annotate data and information collected by volcanologists based on domain knowledge. This will enable the integration of global volcanic data and improve the interoperability of software that deal with such data