Developing a modular hydrogeology ontology by extending the SWEET upper-level ontologies

Upper-level ontologies comprise general concepts and properties which need to be extended to include more diverse and specific domain vocabularies. We present the extension of NASA's Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) ontologies to include part of the hydrogeology domain. We describe a methodology that can be followed by other allied domain experts who intend to adopt the SWEET ontologies in their own discipline. We have maintained the modular design of the SWEET ontologies for maximum extensibility and reusability of our ontology in other fields, to ensure inter-disciplinary knowledge reuse, management, and discovery. The extension of the SWEET ontologies involved identification of the general SWEET concepts (classes) to serve as the super-class of the domain concepts. This was followed by establishing the special inter-relationships between domain concepts (e.g., equivalence for vadose zone and unsaturated zone), and identifying the dependent concepts such as physical properties and units, and their relationship to external concepts. Ontology editing tools such as SWOOP and Protégé were used to analyze and visualize the structure of the existing OWL files. Domain concepts were introduced either as standalone new classes or as subclasses of existing SWEET ontologies. This involved changing the relationships (properties) and/or adding new relationships based on domain theories. In places, in the Owl files, the entire structure of the existing concepts needed to be changed to represent the domain concept more meaningfully. Throughout this process, the orthogonal structure of SWEET ontologies was maintained and the consistency of the concepts was tested using the Racer reasoner. Individuals were added to the new concepts to test the modified ontologies. Our work shows that SWEET ontologies can successfully be extended and reused in any field without losing their modular or reference structure, or disrupting their URI links.