ELFIE - The OGC Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment

Abstract

The OGC Environmental Linked Feature Interoperability Experiment (ELFIE) sought to assess a suite of pre-existing OGC and W3C standards with a view to identifying best practice for exposing cross-domain links between environmental features and observations. Environmental domain models concerning landscape interactions with the hydrologic cycle served as the basis for this study, whilst offering a meaningful constraint on its scope. JSON-LD was selected for serialization; this combines the power of linked data with intuitive encoding. Vocabularies were utilized for the provision of the JSON-LD contexts; these ranged from common vocabularies such as schema.org to semantic representations of OGC/ISO observational standards to domain-specific feature models synonymous with the hydrological and geological domains. Exemplary data for the selected use cases was provided by participants and shared in static form via a GitHub repository. User applications were created to assess the validity of the proposed approach as it pertained to real-world situations. This process resulted in the identification of issues whose resolution is a prerequisite for wide-scale deployment and best practice definition. Addressing these issues will be the focus of future OGC Interoperability Experiments.