The Semantics of Water

Taylor, K.

Australia's scarce water resources is now front page news. There are many challenging problems to be solved to meet this need. For example the science to understand the link between surface and groundwater flows, the monitoring to determine whether regional catchment projects are effective, the policy framework to balance agricultural and environmental benefits, the social and political will to establish efficient water markets, and the science that links climate change to water availability. Underlying and unifying all these challenges is the crying need for information to support the development of knowledge and decision making. Current policy and regulations for water distribution cannot even be monitored for compliance, let alone for continuous improvement. In Australia, the information on water availability at a location is held by dozens of agencies, from irrigators, land managers, regional catchment management boards, water supply agencies, national commissions, state government departments, shire councils, and scientific agencies. A great deal of this data is not empirical, but simulated according to the best science and data available at the time of simulation. And plenty of it doesn't exist at all. Advances in sensor network technology are being sought to improve both the spatial and temporal resolution of data, as well as its currency. Advances in data management, analysis and visualisation are being sought to make sense of the highly heterogeneous data. A large scale multi-agency national resource for water information is envisaged (Water Resources Observation Network 2006). In this talk I will give a personal view (probably uncontroversial to this audience!) on why ontologies are an important part of the water information management solution. It has been recently acknowledged in the Australian healthcare industry that they are crucial for information interoperability amongst many independent agencies, but in this area they are also important for furthering the scientific advances needed for hydrology and ecology. I will survey relevant international work in the area including our own work in CSIRO, and identify some of the research challenges arising. The CSIRO ICT Centre hosts the Australian Office for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C Australia 2006). I will also advertise the current W3C activities that would be of interest to researchers and practitioners working on ontologies.

Cite as: Taylor, K. (2006). The Semantics of Water. In Proc. Second Australasian Ontology Workshop (AOW 2006), Hobart, Australia. CRPIT, 72. Mehmet, A. O. and Thomas, M., Eds. ACS. 3.

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