TY - JOUR
T1 - Semantic validation of environmental observations data
AU - Shu, Yanfeng
AU - Liu, Qing
AU - Taylor, Kerry
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd.
PY - 2016/5/1
Y1 - 2016/5/1
N2 - To facilitate data access, integration and analysis tasks, standardised markup languages are commonly used for communicating data from multiple sources. However, one issue with the use of standardised markup languages is that they generally fail to capture the constraints that are imposed on data contents. As such, semantic validation of data encoded in these languages becomes difficult. In this paper, we focus on one such language, the Water Data Transfer Format (WDTF), and present an approach for validation of WDTF data contents. We show that by using Semantic Web technologies, we can express those constraints not captured by WDTF and check their consistency with respect to data through a query reduction technique that allows existing reasoners to be used for data validation. Finally, we report on an experimental study of our approach and discuss some common errors that we found in data as exposed by the study.
AB - To facilitate data access, integration and analysis tasks, standardised markup languages are commonly used for communicating data from multiple sources. However, one issue with the use of standardised markup languages is that they generally fail to capture the constraints that are imposed on data contents. As such, semantic validation of data encoded in these languages becomes difficult. In this paper, we focus on one such language, the Water Data Transfer Format (WDTF), and present an approach for validation of WDTF data contents. We show that by using Semantic Web technologies, we can express those constraints not captured by WDTF and check their consistency with respect to data through a query reduction technique that allows existing reasoners to be used for data validation. Finally, we report on an experimental study of our approach and discuss some common errors that we found in data as exposed by the study.
KW - Constraints
KW - Data validation
KW - Open and closed world reasoning
KW - Semantic Web
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84955613922&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.01.004
DO - 10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.01.004
M3 - Article
SN - 1364-8152
VL - 79
SP - 10
EP - 21
JO - Environmental Modelling and Software
JF - Environmental Modelling and Software
ER -