Semantic Similarity Computation and Concept Mapping in Earth and Environmental Science

Project Submitted by: Jin Guang Zheng, RPI
Ontologies have been widely adopted and used by Earth and Environmental Science community to capture and represent knowledge in the domain. One of the major problem that prevent us to combine and reuse these ontologies to solve more interesting problems is semantic heterogeneity problem, for example, same vocabularies from different ontologies may refer to different concept; or different terms from different ontologies may have same meaning. In this proposed work, we will address the problem by (1) developing a semantic similarity computation model to compute similarity among the concepts in Earth and Environmental Science; (2) based on the computation model, we will implement concept mapping tool that creates alignment for concepts that are semantically the same; (3) we will demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool using GCMD and CLEAN vocabularies and other earth science related ontologies.