The EDEN-IW Ontology Model for Sharing Knowledge and Water Quality Data between Heterogeneous Databases

Abstract

The Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water (EDEN-IW) project’s main aim is to develop a system for making disparate and heterogeneous databases of Inland Water quality more accessible to users. The core technology is based upon a combination of: ontological model to represent a Semantic Web based data model for IW; software agents as an infrastructure to share and reason about the IW semantic data model and XML to make the information accessible to Web portals and mainstream Web services. This presentation focuses on the Semantic Web or Ontological model. Currently, we have successfully demonstrated the use of our systems to semantically integrate two main database resources from IOW and NERI – these are available on-line. We are in the process of adding further databases and supporting a wider variety of user queries such as Decision Support System queries.