Ontology for semantic representation of marine metadata

Metadata provides the information that describes, explains, or makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage information resources. In the marine field, a metadata model is defined and used for exchange, retrieval, integration, and usage of data, such as hydrographic data. The S-100 of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), recently introduced new paradigm for integration and usage of various data on marine safety and the marine environment, also includes a metadata model defined in uniformed modeling language (UML). This model, consisting of entities that describe the main concepts and conceptual structures of metadata, provides for syntactic interoperability between systems. However, semantic heterogeneities as well as difficulties encountered in automatic semantic-based processing remain yet. For the purposes of enhancing semantic interoperability between systems on the S-100-based infrastructure, we herein introduce a new metadata ontology. Analyzing metadata elements in the S-100 metadata model, we removed the syntactic and semantic redundancies of the metadata elements. After conceptualizing and generalizing the metadata elements, we defined ontology elements free of syntactic or semantic redundancy. Additionally, we improved the previous ontology by UML-to-OWL conversion.