Enabling Integration of climate system data with Ontology

We are developing the Climate System Ontology (CSO) by formally characterizing the parameters of the five major subsystems of the climate system and their complex interactions that bring changes to the state of these variables. Each subsystem of the complex climate system has all forms of matter (gas, liquid, solid) that continuously interact with each other or with the components of other subsystems across system boundaries. These components have physical and material properties, roles, and functions that dynamically change through varied intra- and inter-system processes, e.g., when air humidity changes as the ocean surface temperature rises leading to evaporation. CSO semantically models these changes when components of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, geosphere, and biosphere participate as input or output in various, mostly as non-linear processes. Diverse sets of land-, ocean-, and space-based measuring devices and sensors continuously measure and record the state of the main components of the climate system such as air temperature, pH of ocean water, and humidity. To annotate such data, we build CSO as an extension of the open source, widely used, and standard top-level Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and its underlying mid-level Common Core Ontologies (CCO). CCOs Information content entity (ICE) allows us to represent various climate information artifacts and enables their alignment and integration. As a reference ontology that semantically models the principal processes in the climate system applying the logical constructs of BFO and CCO, CSO will enable interoperability of the domain and application ontologies that extend it. CSO models processes that are internal to each subsystem such as thermohaline circulation, oscillation, oceanic current in oceans and condensation, cloud formation, and precipitation in the atmosphere. It also formalizes the input, output, and temporal sequence of the interactive processes such as atmosphere-hydrosphere (evaporation, heat exchange), atmosphere-geosphere-hydrosphere (weathering, circulation of volcanic particles, precipitation), and cryosphere-geosphere-hydrosphere (subsidence due to melting of permafrost, melting of glaciers, sea level rise), and biosphere activities (combustion of fossil fuel, deforestation).