Welcome
Overview
Sensor ontologies are becoming increasing important for creating standard dictionaries of sensor-related terminology and for mapping relationships between these terms. Many sensor technologies, including the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) encodings and web services, depend on and benefit greatly from the existence of online, resolvable ontologies of all terms related to sensors.
Ontologies are needed for everything from observable properties (e.g. temperature, radiation, position, etc.) to terms for describing sensor characteristics, capabilities, roles, types, platforms, and interfaces. This site provides a registry of ontologies as well as web-based tools for supporting the creation, maintenance, and referencing of such sensor ontologies.
Web Tools
This site is based on a suite of ontology tools integrated or developed by the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project. Special thanks to John Graybeal, Carlos Rueda, Luis Bermudez, and Paul Alexander with the MMI team, as well as the design and development team for the Stanford Bioportal, for developing and making these tools available. See presentation.
This suite of tools is integrated through web browser interfaces and consist of:
- Stanford Bioportal backend - provides ontology registry and repository
- Voc2RDF - imports CSV files into RDF ontology
- VINE - supports mapping relationships between ontologies
- SPARQL - supports complex queries for ontologies
- Reasoner - handles inferences between terms
- Converters - supports exporting to RDF, N3, OWL, and other formats
- Browsers - supports examination of ontologies
Links to Ontologies at sensorML.com
Ontology Registry and Repository (ORR) - Collection of sensor ontologies to browse and search; also provide interface to tools for creating, editing, and mapping ontologies
Ontology Term Search - Search all registered ontologies for occurrences of a term (e.g. radar)
Ontology Tools Description - Description of the ontology framework used at sensorML.com (hosted at MMI)
Ontology Tools Help - Help pages (hosted at MMI)
Example Applications of Terms in SensorML
<sml:input name="SurfaceTemperature>
<sml:ObservableProperty
definition="http://sensors.ws/ont/NMMO/sensor/SeaSurfaceTemperature"/>
</sml:input>
<sml:parameter name="FocalLength">
<swe:Quantity
definition="http://sensors.ws/ont/NMMO/sensor/SensorFocalLength">
<swe:uom code="mm"/>
<swe:value>50.0</swe:value>
</swe:Quantity>
</sml:parameter>