SUPPORTING INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH THROUGH SEMANTIC INTEGRATION OF VOLCANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC DATA

Emerging semantic technologies have the potential to increase opportunities for interdisciplinary research by providing support for automatic and semi-automatic integration of data. Our work aims to enable interdisciplinary work with an initial prototype aimed at supporting volcanic and atmospheric integration. The integrated result will enable researchers to investigate relationships between volcanic activity and global climate. Our goal is to demonstrate how semantic technologies can enable the next generation in virtual distributed platforms that enable ontology-enhanced search, retrieval, and analysis services of data across multiple disciplines.

Our methodology relies on encoding background knowledge concerning terms along with declarative specifications of their meanings in ontologies. We have developed ontologies in the areas of volcanoes and plate tectonics after having met with a number of leading domain science experts. We have also generated an initial atmosphere ontology utilizing a smaller number of domain science experts. In this presentation, we will describe our knowledge acquisition capture method, describe our ontologies to date, and show how they support our integrated use cases in investigating relationships between the atmosphere and volcanic activity.