The SewerNet domain ontology: on clarifying and harmonising terminology

Wastewater network management is being digitised and integrated across municipalities. A shared understanding and terminology of the systems is important both for modern urban water management and modelling climate-induced stressors on the network. Ontologies are a well-known mechanism to record the shared understanding. While several ontologies exist that focus on the water, and several exist on service infrastructure, there is a gap in the ontology landscape about wastewater services infrastructure. 

We are currently developing an ontology about wastewater networks and a first version is publicly available at http://sewernet.hsm.umontpellier.fr/. Key aims for the use of the ontology in our project are data integration, ontology-based query answering the detect incoherent data in wastewater network databases, and document annotation, but, it being a domain ontology, SewerNet is usable also for other types of ontology-mediated information systems. In this talk, we focus on interesting discrepancies and lack of clarity in non-ontological resources we used for the development, such as the INSPIRE EU directive and the RAEPA geostandard, that needed to be harmonised in the ontology. Examples include pipe versus conduit, disambiguation between maintenance plans and individual repair actions, precision/uncertainty in the measurements, circulation mode.  The use of a foundational ontology (DOLCE) to assist structuring content was perceived beneficial, as well as the ontological questions to align to the DOLCE entities, which helped probing the nature of the entity and elucidate assumptions about terms.