Toward A Foundational Hydro Ontology For Water Data Interoperability

Hydro ontologies are digital artifacts that contain representations of hydrological entities. They are being constructed to advance interoperability within and between various water data networks. Increased growth of such networks, however, is prompting integration of a greater variety of data, which requires a more general and principled approach to hydro ontology. One such approach is the development of a canonical reference ontology. This paper describes recent progress on the development of such an ontology for both the surface and subsurface hydro domains. Identified is a container schema that anchors the ontology, and also described is an initial representation of the ontology

An Ontology for Grounding Vague Geographic Terms

Many geographic terms, such as “river” and “lake”, are vague, with no clear boundaries of application. In particular, the spatial extent of such features is often vaguely carved out of a continuously varying observable domain. We present a means of defining vague terms using standpoint semantics, a refinement of the philosophical idea of supervaluation semantics. Such definitions can be grounded in actual data by geometric analysis and segmentation of the data set. The issues raised by this process with regard to the nature of boundaries and domains of logical quantification are discussed. We describe a prototype implementation of a system capable of segmenting attributed polygon data into geographically significant regions and evaluating queries involving vague geographic feature terms

Supervaluation semantics for an inland water feature ontology

This paper describes an ontology for inland water features built using formal concept analysis and supervaluation semantics. The first is used to generate a complete lattice of the water domain, whereas supervaluation semantics is used to model the variability of the concepts in terms of threshold parameters. We also present an algorithm for a mechanism of individuation and classification of water features, from snapshots of river networks, according to the proposed ontology.