Semantic Sensor Network Vocabulary

Moving the W3C SSN Ontology to W3C Recommendation status has been identified as an activity to be undertaken by the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group [1]. 

I was not present for the discussions that led to this specific recommendation, so it is not clear if the related work in OGC was also considered as input. Specifically, a direct conversion of the OGC O&M model [2] to OWL was developed using the UML-->OWL conversion rule developed in ISO/TC 211 [3]. 

However, feedback from various parts of the community have identified issues with both this and SSN, particularly in the extent to which they require a commitment to additional external ontologies. In response to this, I have developed a lightweight ontology for O&M. Two ontologies are proposed, for Observations, and for Sampling Features (an aspect of O&M that is not implemented in SSN). The key feature of the new ontologies are that they have almost no external dependencies. Time and space are implemented as stub classes, with no associated properties, which can be substituted in instances by anyone's favourite time or space implementation (e.g. OWL-Time, W3Geo, GeoSPARQL, etc.). om-lite has no external dependencies, and sam-lite is linked to the W3C PROV-O ontology to support the 'specimen' model. The new ontology could be used as the basis for more specialized ontologies, or for bridging between existing ontologies. I've described this in a paper submitted to Semantic Web Journal where it is currently in review. SWJ has an open review system, so the submission can be viewed there already [4].  The proposed ontologies are available online [5]. 

I hope this contribution can be considered as input to the Sensor Ontology activity within the Spatial Data on the Web working group. 

[1] http://www.w3.org/2014/05/geo-charter 
[2] http://www.opengis.net/doc/om 
[3] http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1063/paper1.pdf 
[4] http://semantic-web-journal.net/content/basic-observations-and-sampling-feature-ontology 
[5] http://def.seegrid.csiro.au/ontology/om/om-lite, http://def.seegrid.csiro.au/ontology/om/sam-lite 


Simon Cox


Simon J D Cox 
Research Scientist
Land and Water 
CSIRO
 
E simon.cox@csiro.au T +61 3 9252 6342 M +61 403 302 672
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Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2014 05:45:43 UTC