Platform Ontology updated

The MMI platform ontology, originally created in 2006, has recently been revised, and will likely receive more attention in coming months. Some of the changes include some added definitions and terms (classes), and minor corrections to a few existing platform classes.

While there are still many improvements to be made to this ontology, it represents a significant step toward characterizing a variety of marine and environmental observing platforms in a systematic way. The ontology mechanism allows the definition of complex relationships among terms (classes) and properties. These relationships allows other systems to build more reliable reference vocabularies, and to relate their own platform terms to a common structure.

The relationships in the platform ontology also allow semantic tools to make inferences about the concepts in the ontology, and their relationship to other concepts in other ontologies.

The new platform ontology is stored on the Source Forge svn repository, and can be found at
  http://mmi.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mmi/mmisw/platform.owl

In coming months our ontologies will be moved to the MMI Ontology Registry; visit the Platform Ontology team at MMI for the latest links to the ontology.