SWEET 2.0: Moving Toward Community-Based Ontologies

The Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) project has produced an upper-level ontology set for Earth system science. These ontologies have been under development for several years and include concepts of science, data, and services. SWEET includes mappings to other controlled vocabulary lists such as the GCMD science keyword and CF standard names. The initial design (SWEET 1.0) defined about 1700 concepts organized by facet, such as: physical property, small-scale process, large-scale phenomena, living and non-living substance, Earth realm, space, time, units, etc. For Version 2.0, the number of concepts has doubled to 3500 and the facet structure is similar. However, there no longer remains a one-to-one mapping of a facet to an ontology file. The original 12 ontology files have been reorganized into nearly 100 files, organized by subject. This new design is much more scalable, as it is easy for domain specialists to add content for their specialization by adding an additional file. SWEET enables representations of all aspects of the Earth system (from core to heliosphere) and more general aspects of planetary and solar science. It is anticipated that the ESIP Federation Semantic Web Cluster will maintain this ontology set over the long-term.