ABSTRACT
Over the past years, a large variety of methods have been proposed to protect wetlands—the kidney of the earth. How to apply these methods is an urgently crucial problem. This study applies ontology technology to wetland protection domains, and provides a potential alternative tool to the current mainstream methods in knowledge management and information sharing. We focus on two main objectives. The first is to propose the construction of wetland protection ontology—WP-Onto (Wetland Protection Ontology), which consists of four stages: (i) demand analysis; (ii) establishment of knowledge set; (iii) refinement and extraction of concepts and relations, and establishment of ontology; (iv) encoding and formalization of ontology. The second is the application of ontology, consisting of information sharing and knowledge management.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of P. R. China (60674073), National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (2006CB403405), and National Key Technology R&D Program of China (2006BAB14B05).