Ontologies for Research Data Description: A Design Process Applied to Vehicle Simulation

• Published in: Metadata and Semantics Research pp. 348 - 354
• Main Authors: Castro, João Aguiar, Perrotta, Deborah, Amorim, Ricardo Carvalho, da Silva, João Rocha, Ribeiro, Cristina
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2015
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Metadata models; Ontologies; Research data management; Vehicle simulation
• ISBN: 9783319241289; 3319241281
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24129-6_30

Data description is an essential part of research data management, and it is easy to argue for the importance of describing data early in the research workflow. Specific metadata schemas are often proposed to support description. Given the diversity of research domains, such schemas are often missing, and when available they may be too generic, too complex or hard to incorporate in a description platform. In this paper we present a method used to design metadata models for research data description as ontologies. Ontologies are gaining acceptance as knowledge representation structures, and we use them here in the scope of the Dendro platform. The ontology design process is illustrated with a case study from Vehicle Simulation. According to the design process, the resulting model was validated by a domain specialist.