Earth System Grid Ontology

The ESG ontology is written in OWL-DL and was primarily developed for adding metadata to datasets found in the Earth System Grid (ESG) portal. It is easiest to view it with Protege 3.0. It is a mixed bag of concepts and includes housekeeping information as well as earth science specific information. It has been checked for consistency and (ontology-related) errors.

The ESG Ontology was developed for the Earth System Grid, a project of the US. Department of Energy through the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program. ESG brings to the earth sciences community datasets produced by simulations, in particular but not exclusively, those produced for the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. The ESG ontology has been created by Dr. Line C. Pouchard, Computer Science and Mathematics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1 Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37831. For re-use and distribution, please observe open source licensing practices and credit the author and sponsors.

There are concepts directly borrowed from the CCLRC metadata model (activity, investigation, project, participant, role, etc...). AS ESG data is formatted in NetCDF, the ESG ontology uses the NetCDF format for some classes (data-time encoding and calendar also follow ISO 8601). Some classes cover simulation codes and hardware.

The Observation class is a sub-class of Investigation, and not very developed at thispoint since ESG focuses on simulation data, but some classes such as SpaceCoverage and TimeCoverage may still be of use for representing boundary conditions.

The ESG portal can be found at:
Documentation is under "About ESG->Documents."

Maturity Estimate

Mature and stable for its purpose(i.e. ESG). But concepts need to be extended for use by a larger community.

All feedback is welcome. Suggestions on how to extend poorly represented concepts are especially welcome.