No abstract

Abstract. The goal of the ontology requirements specification activity is to state why the ontology is being built, what its intended uses are, who the endusers are, and which requirements the ontology should fulfill. The novelty of this paper lies in the systematization of the ontology requirements specification activity since the paper proposes detailed methodological guidelines for specifying ontology requirements efficiently. These guidelines will help ontology engineers to capture ontology requirements and produce the ontology requirements specification document (ORSD). The ORSD will play a key role during the ontology development process because it facilitates, among other activities, (1) the search and reuse of existing knowledge-aware resources with the aim of re-engineering them into ontologies, (2) the search and reuse of existing ontological resources (ontologies, ontology modules, ontology statements as well as ontology design patterns), and (3) the verification of the ontology along the ontology development. In parallel to the guidelines, we present the ORSD that resulted from the ontology requirements specification activity within the SEEMP project, and how this document facilitated not only the reuse of existing knowledge-aware resources but also the verification of the SEEMP ontologies. Moreover, we present some use cases in which the methodological guidelines proposed here were applied.

This paper describes the process followed in order to make some of the public meterological data from the Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET, Spanish Meteorological Office) available as Linked Data. The method followed has been already used to publish geographical, statistical, and leisure data. The data selected for publication are generated every ten minutes by the 250 automatic stations that belong to AEMET and that are deployed across Spain. These data are available as spreadsheets in the AEMET data catalog, and contain more than twenty types of measurements per station. Spreadsheets are retrieved from the website, processed with Python scripts, transformed to RDF according to an ontology network about meteorology that reuses the W3C SSN Ontology, published in a triple store and visualized in maps with Map4rdf.

To speed up the ontology development process, ontology developers are reusing all available ontological and non-ontological resources, such as classification schemes, thesauri, lexicons, and so forth, that have already reached some consensus. Non-ontological resources are highly heterogeneous in their data model and storage system (or implementation). The reuse of these non-ontological resources involves their re-engineering into ontologies. This paper presents a method for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies. The method is based on so-called re-engineering patterns, which define a procedure that transforms the non-ontological resource components into ontology representational primitives using WordNet for making explicit the relations among the non-ontological resource terms. The paper also provides the description of NOR2O, a software library that implements the transformations suggested by the patterns. Finally, it depicts an evaluation of the method, patterns, and software library proposed.

No abstract