Building Ontologies of Environmental Applications for a Digital Library of Scientific Collections

摘要

In this paper, a first attempt is made to build an ontology of environmental applications in the context of search and navigation needs of the Digital Library ARION containing geospatial data sets and environmental applications. The engineering of the ontology is modular where each module is structured according to different facets of scientific information, for example, scientific information may be described according to the data sets, production methods including mathematical modeling etc. These facets correspond to core queries users would like to ask in a scientific DL like ARION. This modular (facet-based) approach scales well with large scientific ontologies, where new information may be appended in accordance to user/provider needs. Our approach is neither exhaustive nor exclusive.