From metadata to ontology representation: A case of converting severe weather forecast metadata to an ontology

With the increasing amount of data generated in geoscience research, it becomes critical to describe data sets in meaningful ways. A large number of described data sets are described using XML metadata, which has proved a useful means of expressing data characteristics. An ontological representation is another way of representing data sets with the benefit of providing rich semantics, convenient linkage to other data sets, and good interoperability with other data. This study represents geoscience data sets as an ontology based on an existing metadata description and on the nature of the data set. It takes the case of Vortex2 data, a regional weather forecast data set collected in Summer 2010, to showcase how forecast data can be represented in ontology by using the existing metadata information. It supplies another type of representation of the data set with added semantics and potential functionalities compared to the previous metadata representation.