Modeling the Impacts of Agriculture on Water Resources: Semantic Interoperability Issues

The advance of web collaborative systems brought new possibilities for the research of complex interdisciplinary topics by means of scientific multidisciplinary networks. Potentially, computational systems can support the management of multifaceted and large scale data sources, providing valuable and indispensable information for the researches. However, these solutions rely on semantic interoperability problems as well as the construction of complex knowledge representation models. This paper describes interoperability issues on the engineering process of the OntoAgroHidro, an ontology to represent knowledge about impacts of agricultural activities on water resources, as well as the impacts from possible climatic changes. The paper also presents representative scenarios and questions, and discusses the reuse and integration of concepts using knowledge visualization techniques.