SWEET Ontology Suite v3.0.0: Development, Alignments and Use Cases

Version 3.0.0 of the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) Ontology suite was recently released under new community management and governance by ESIP’s Semantic Technologies Committee (STC). SWEET is a highly modular ontology suite with ~6000 concepts in ~200 separate ontologies covering Earth system science. A mid-level ontology, SWEET consists of nine top-level concepts that can be used as a foundation for domain-specific ontologies that extend these top-level components. SWEET’s own domain-specific ontologies (which extend the upper level ontologies) can provide users interested in further developing a particular domain with a solid set of concepts to get started. SWEET ontologies are written in W3C Turtle; the Terse RDF Triple Language, and are publicly available under the Apache License v2.0. This presentation will provide a three-pronged update on (i) advances in SWEET since its transition from NASA JPL over to the open source, community-driven management and governance structure overseen by the ESIP STC, (ii) ongoing alignment activities with existing semantic technology resources such as the OBO Foundry collection, W3C SOSA/SSN, W3C PROV-O, etc., and (iii) uses of SWEET across old, new and unexpected domains including provenance of science data product generation, search and information retrieval query expansion, article and text tagging, and a whole host more. This session aims to attract new comers and experienced Geospatial and Spatiotemporal Ontology/Semantics enthusiasts. Attendees will leave with an improved understanding of what SWEET currently is, what it hopes to become and how one can use it for a wide variety of scenarios.