The CIDOC CRM, an Ontological Approach to Schema Heterogeneity

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), now ISO/CD21127, is a core ontology that aims at enabling information exchange and integration between heterogeneous sources of cultural heritage information, archives and libraries. It provides semantic definitions and clarifications needed to transform disparate, heterogeneous information sources into a coherent global resource, be it within a larger institution, in intranets or on the Internet. It is argued that such an ontology is property-centric, compact and highly generic, in contrast to terminological systems. The presentation will demonstrate how such a well-crafted core ontology can help to achieve a very high precision of schema integration at reasonable cost in a huge, diverse domain. It is further argued that such ontologies are widely reusable and adaptable to other domains which makes their development cost effective

Joint Canada-U.S. Survey in the Mount Kennedy Region

In 1935 a National Geographic Society glaciological expedition working in the St. Elias mountain range near the Alaska-Yukon Territory boundary described an unnamed mountain in the area as "magnificent, a granite peak sheathed in snow and ice on the south and west sides, and on the north and east sides has fantastic rock cliffs." Thirty years later this same peak was officially named Mount Kennedy in honour of the late President John F. Kennedy. A surge of activity in the area followed immediately. Senator Robert Kennedy climbed the mountain, an expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society is engaged in producing a large scale map of the mountain and its environs, and a joint U.S.-Canadian party has just completed a survey through the area which will determine the precise geographic position of the mountain's summit and its elevation. The survey party was composed of six men from the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and two men from the Surveys and Mapping Branch of the Canadian Department of Mines and Technical Surveys. The main purpose of the work was to connect existing surveys along the Alaska Highway with similar surveys along the Alaskan coast. The work will strengthen the control surveys throughout the area and provide new control points for mapping. The decision to include Mount Kennedy in the survey, while adding a touch of glamour to the operation, greatly increased the difficulties. The survey itself consists of five main stations, connected by traverse, with auxiliary points established at alternate stations to provide additional checks on field measurements. The lengths of the four traverse courses varied from eight to thirty-nine miles; the distances were measured by electronic distance measuring equipment, and the angles were measured with precise theodolites using signal lights and heliotropes for targets. ..

Analyzing the discharge regime of a large tropical river through remote sensing, ground-based climatic data, and modeling

This study demonstrates the potential for applying passive microwave satellite sensor data to infer the discharge dynamics of large river systems using the main stem Amazon as a test case. The methodology combines (1) interpolated ground-based meteorological station data, (2) horizontally and vertically polarized temperature differences (HVPTD) from the 37-GHz scanning multichannel microwave radiometer (SMMR) aboard the Nimbus 7 satellite, and (3) a calibrated water balance/water transport model (WBM/WTM). Monthly HVPTD values at 0.25° (latitude by longitude) resolution were resampled spatially and temporally to produce an enhanced HVPTD time series at 0.5° resolution for the period May 1979 through February 1985. Enhanced HVPTD values were regressed against monthly discharge derived from the WBM/WTM for each of 40 grid cells along the main stem over a calibration period from May 1979 to February 1983 to provide a spatially contiguous estimate of time-varying discharge. HVPTD-estimated flows generated for a validation period from March 1983 to February 1985 were found to be in good agreement with both observed arid modeled discharges over a 1400-km section of the main stem Amazon. This span of river is bounded downstream by a region of tidal influence and upstream by low sensor response associated with dense forest canopy. Both the WBM/WTM and HVPTD-derived flow rates reflect the significant impact of the 1982–1983 El Niño-;Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event on water balances within the drainage basin

Adaptation to compound climate risks : A systematic global stocktake

This article provides a stocktake of the adaptation literature between 2013 and 2019 to better understand how adaptation responses affect risk under the particularly challenging conditions of compound climate events. Across 39 countries, 45 response types to compound hazards display anticipatory (9%), reactive (33%), and maladaptive (41%) characteristics, as well as hard (18%) and soft (68%) limits to adaptation. Low income, food insecurity, and access to institutional resources and finance are the most prominent of 23 vulnerabilities observed to negatively affect responses. Risk for food security, health, livelihoods, and economic outputs are commonly associated risks driving responses. Narrow geographical and sectoral foci of the literature highlight important conceptual, sectoral, and geographic areas for future research to better understand the way responses shape risk. When responses are integrated within climate risk assessment and management, there is greater potential to advance the urgency of response and safeguards for the most vulnerable

Ontology Mapping: The State of the Art

Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today\u27s landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mapping has beeb the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping

Ontology Alignment: An annotated Bibliography

Ontology mapping, alignment, and translation has been an active research component of the general research on semantic integration and interoperability. In our talk, we gave our own classification of different topics in this research. We talked about types of heterogeneity between ontologies, various mapping representations, classified methods for discovering methods both between ontology concepts and data, and talked about various tasks where mappings are used. In this extended abstract of our talk, we provide an annotated bibliography for this area of research, giving readers brief pointers on representative papers in each of the topics mentioned above. We did not attempt to compile a comprehensive bibliography and hence the list in this abstract is necessarily incomplete. Rather, we tried to sketch a map of the field, with some specific reference to help interested readers in their exploration of the work to-date