An Observational Process Ontology-Based Modeling Approach for Water Quality Monitoring

Abstract

The increasing deterioration of aquatic environments has attracted more attention to water quality monitoring techniques, with most researchers focusing on the acquisition and assessment of water quality data, but seldom on the discovery and tracing of pollution sources. In this study, a semantic-enhanced modeling method for ontology modeling and rules building is proposed, which can be used for river water quality monitoring and relevant data observation processing. The observational process ontology (OPO) method can describe the semantic properties of water resources and observation data. In addition, it can provide the semantic relevance among the different concepts involved in the observational process of water quality monitoring. A pollution alert can be achieved using the reasoning rules for the water quality monitoring stations. In this study, a case is made for the usability testing of the OPO models and reasoning rules by utilizing a water quality monitoring system. The system contributes to the water quality observational monitoring process and traces the source of pollutants using sensors, observation data, process models, and observation products that users can access in a timely manner.