Building a Semantic Web System for Scientific Applications: An Engineering Approach

This paper presents an engineering experience for building a Semantic Web compliant system for a scientific application – agricultural zoning. First, we define the concept of ontological cover and a set of relationships between such covers. These definitions, based on domain ontologies, can be used, for example, to support the discovery of services on the Web. Second, we propose a semantic acyclic restriction on ontologies which enables the efficient comparison of ontological covers. Third, we present different engineering solutions to build ontology views satisfying the acyclic restriction in a prototype. Our experimental results unveil some limitations of the current Semantic Web technology to handle large data volumes, and show that the combination of such technology with traditional data management techniques is an effective way to achieve highly functional and scalable solutions.