Chen-Chieh Feng and Yu Liang, 2011 Association of American Geographers' Annual Meeting(AAG 2011), Seattle, Washington, 12-16 April, 2011.

Abstract: This paper is about an event-based ontology for characterizing the provenance of geoprocessing workflow in GIS, which is capable of tracking the causal relations between the physical entities in reality that partake the geoprocessing workflow and the geoprocessing entities that represent these physical entities. The ontology helps researchers and data users understand the lifecycle of artifacts and entities from real world in a geoprocessing workflow, including creation, change, and extinction of entities. It can be used to answer the questions such as how the data are generated and is particular useful for reasoning the potential causes of sudden changes in certain observations of a particular phenomenon.
To develop the ontology, we start with general concept of event and elaborate the concept with its subordinate and auxiliary concepts. Following the formal relations between events and the objects affected by the events, the artifacts and the entities that participate in the events and their status are identified. We then examine how the provenance of existing data sources can be extracted and develop tools to capture the provenance information. An XML-based schema is developed to encode the provenance and to facilitate provenance information exchange. The XML-based schema is later converted into OWL to leverage on the capability of reasoning tools to answer complex questions on the life cycle of the data and physical entities. Axioms and rules are developed to enhance the reasoning ability of the ontology.

Keywords: Provenance, event, Geoprocessing, GIS

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