Climate Change TimeLine: An Ontology to Tell the Story so Far

Abstract

In this paper we present an ontological approach to build a knowledge-base on climate change related facts. Our knowledge space, developed in Ontology Web Language (OWL), enables knowledge within the Semantic Web. It allows a dynamic classification and a semantic characterization of the different events that can be related to each other, as well as to external sources of information. The resulting ontology is structured as a timeline which aims to describe the climate change story from multiple perspectives, including scientific, social, political and technological ones. We have created an instance of the ontology as an attempt to tell the climate change story so far. Such a population is based on the collection of factual information and critical literature review, with a focus on relevant theories, happenings, social and political initiatives.

Keywords

• Climate change
• ontology
• OWL
• semantic web
• knowledge management