Building Geoscience Semantic Web Applications Using Established Ontologies

The EarthCollab project is using the VIVO Semantic Web software suite to support the discovery of information, data, and potential collaborators within the geodesy and polar science communities. This paper discusses the ontology selection, consolidation, and reuse efforts of EarthCollab. EarthCollab’s ontology design approach heavily emphasizes ontology reuse, bringing together existing ontologies to support diverse use cases related to the discovery of geoscience information and resources. We developed a small local ontology to tie these existing ontologies together and to build appropriate geoscience-relevant connections. Five key ontology decision drivers are presented to outline EarthCollab’s ontology design process and decision points: use cases, existing systems and metadata, semantic application dependencies, external ontology characteristics, and community recommendations for good ontological modeling practices.