A Faceted Lightweight Ontology for Earthquake Engineering Research Projects and Experiments

Abstract

With the invention of the Semantic Web, computing paradigm is experiencing a shift from databases to Knowledge Bases (KB), in which ontologies play a major role in enabling reasoning power that can make implicit facts explicit to produce better results for users. In addition, KB‐based systems provide mechanism to manage information and semantics thereof that can make systems semantically interoperable and as such can exchange and share data between them. To overcome the interoperability issues and to exploit the benefits offered by the state of the art technologies, we moved to the KB-based system. Essentially, we have developed an earthquake engineering ontology using a faceted approach with a focus on research project management and experiments. Following the validation of the ontology by a domain expert, it was published in the knowledge representation language RDF and integrated to the generic ontology WordNet. The experimental data coming from, inter alia, cyclic and pseudo-dynamic tests were also published in RDF. We used Jena, OWLIM and Sesame tools for publishing, storage and management, respectively. Finally, after integrating the tools, ontologies and data, we developed a system to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach and in fact we found quite convincing and satisfactory results.