Technical Report: Representing SES Cases Using Ontology

TL;DR

This paper presents an ontology-based approach to represent socio-ecological system (SES) cases, aiming to organize concepts, resources, and facilitate data sharing and querying for SES research.

Contribution

The authors develop a core SES ontology and a tool, Cmap2SES, to model SES cases and support data organization and retrieval in the field.

Findings

Created a core SES ontology covering key concepts and resources.

Developed Cmap2SES tool for graph-based SES case contribution.

Facilitated better data organization and querying in SES research.

Abstract

Socio-ecological System (SES) research studies the interaction between environment, users, and governance of environment resources. Data produced during the research cycle can be both long-tail (e.g. heterogeneous) and longitudinal data. For example, the IFRI (International Forestry Resources and Institutions) data set contains studies carried out over a period of 20 years. Given the complexity of a SES system, case studies that are accumulated over time and from different sites (e.g. site visit cases) are highly valuable in the understanding of new SES system behavior for instance. We, as a group of informatics researchers collaborating with personnel from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, are developing informatics approaches to facilitating SES scholars' research. Here we focus on presenting our work on representing SES cases using ontology. An ontology for the SES field can help organize concepts in the field, describe resources such as data and publications using a shared vocabulary, and also facilitate data use and query for researchers. We develop a core SES ontology, which contains core concepts and resources in the field and can be used to describe actual concept and resource instances, and also a tool for contributing instances by drawing graphs, called Cmap2SES.