Title:Sensors Tell More than They Sense: Modeling and Reasoning about Sensor Observations for Understanding Weather Events
VOLUME: 2 ISSUE: 1
Author(s):Anusuriya Devaraju and Tomi Kauppinen
Affiliation:Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, University Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM), Locked Bag 1752, Pejabat Pos Durian Tunggal Melaka, 76109 Malaysia.
Keywords:Events, observations, ontology, query, rule-based representation and reasoning, sensors, weather, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET), Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic, Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE)
Abstract:In this paper, we argue that sensors provide a better understanding of geographic events. They produce
observations that reflect the natural events taking place at a particular location. The essential part of deriving information
about geographic events from sensor observations is to formalize the relations between them. In this spirit, we develop an
ontology to capture the relations between weather events and properties observed by sensors. A case study is investigated
to illustrate how blizzard events can be formally represented in relation to a set of atmospheric properties observed by a
weather station. Using the ontological structures, we define and implement rules to reason about blizzard events from
hourly weather observations. We use the historical weather records from the Canadian Climate Archives database to
evaluate our approach. The result includes an interactive timeline illustrating the events. The approach is evaluated in
terms of reasoning and querying support against a local use.
