ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the development of a surface water ontology for semantic technology that reflects information about real-world entities and leverages legacy databases aligned with a different technical data model. Surface water accumulates in depressions on the earth’s surface at geographic scales, persists for periods of time, and flows or recedes over the surface as a function of elevation. Surface water is a primary category of human environmental interest; its study and representation as land cover has a long history. In a major systematic linguistic analysis, the lexical term “body of water” was parsed into English-language synsets by the WordNet project. Body of water was assigned to domain categories of river, lake, and ocean, and related with two predominant properties, type and part, to broader or narrower classes.
