An Ontology Representation for Water Bodies

Abstract:

The interoperability of hydrological data has been a major concern in recent years, as evident by the maturation of international standards as well as the development of national and international data systems. Notwithstanding the related significant efforts at modeling hydrological entities, there remain unresolved questions about some core entities that impact the design of hydro schemas, ontologies, and similar knowledge models. One such central entity is the water body, which is represented quite heterogeneously in such models, potentially challenging their interoperability. To meet this challenge, we carry out an ontological analysis of the water body entity and propose a new ontological representation for it, as part of a wider initiative into foundational hydro ontology. The representation exhibits the surprising result that a water body is a mereological entity that is essentially grounded in two types of whole-part relations. The nuanced nature of this result has the potential to inform the design of other hydro knowledge models, as well as to foster interoperability between them.