At your service: An interactive, flexible web-service for translating classification systems and taxonomies

Abstract

Geoscientists have developed and applied classification systems and taxonomies in an effort to enhance and share their understanding of complex geoscience information. However, the classification systems and taxonomies used throughout the geosciences for land cover and land use, soils, geology are neither static nor universal; the classes that we use to represent the Earth vary considerably with time and from place to place. As a general example, think of a geologic map. There are instances when mapped data contains desirable categories, but the granularity of those categories is not suitable. There are also instances where two or more maps (or data sets) lack the desired categories, or the categories across maps are semantically incompatible. This is to be expected, given that: (i) new science, social and economic agendas change what we may wish to differentiate when we look at a map and (ii) new technologies make differentiation of previously inseperable classes more reliable, thus viable. This paper describes ongoing work to create a web-based semantic translation service that allows users to: (i) experiment with mappings between classification systems and taxonomies; (ii) visualize translation maps using a given mapping; and (iii) persist their translation maps, and share them with others. Semantic equivalence and similarity are supported via underlying ontologies, which also facilitate the merging and re-grouping of classes.