| Abstract
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When scientific progress depends on integr … When scientific progress depends on integration of data across disciplines, it is critical for the users in the diverse disciplines to have access to the data in terms they can understand and use. Ontologies provide a method for encoding terms, term meaning, and term inter-relationships in a machine interpretable format. In a geology setting, this means that ontologies provide a way of representing geologic terms and their associated properties. These encodings can enable interoperability and interdisciplinary data integration by allowing end users and agents to access precise, operational term definitions. In support of a NASA-funded scientific application that needs to share volcano and climate data to investigate relationships between volcanism and global climate, we have begun to generate a volcano ontology. Our goal is to create a reference ontology - an open terminology representation that is meant to be shared and reused by a broad community of users interested in the subject area as well as to provide access to key volcanology databases. At a kickoff ontology workshop in our Semantically Enabled Scientific Data Integration (SESDI) project, we brought together a small group of volcano experts and science ontology experts. The result of our workshop is an initial volcano ontology on which we welcome comments. The initial ontology provides a well defined vocabulary of terms and phrases used to classify volcanoes, volcanic activities, and eruption phenomena. Volcanoes can be classified by composition, tectonic setting, environmental setting, eruption type, activity, geologic setting, and landform. The ontology currently contains upper level terms in these areas and is being expanded according to the needs of the project. A view of the ontology in concept maps is available. Current focus areas include investigation of existing schemas such as WOVOdat as well as existing controlled vocabularies and glossaries such as the USGS/AGI definitions for volcanoes and their products. Additionally, we are reviewing relevant ontologies that may be expanded to cover our subject areas, such as SWEET and those developed by GEON, and others with template and reusable style such as the instrument/parameter encoding in the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) instrument ontology. al Observatory (VSTO) instrument ontology.
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