A general Sensor Web Resource Ontology for atmospheric observation

The Sensor Web is a coordinated observation infrastructure composed of distributed resources that can behave as a single, autonomous, task-able, reconfigurable observing system that provides observed and derived data along with the associated metadata by using a set of standards-based service oriented interfaces. But these resources, including sensor, data, platform etc., with different characteristics are hard to be fused well. This paper analyzes concepts of various types of sensor web resources for atmospheric observing, focusing on how to access different types of resources expediently, abstract essential features of these sensor web resources, and construct a Sensor Web Resources Ontology for Atmospheric Observation (SWRO-AO) represented by Web Ontology Language. The SWRO-AO could serve as a knowledge repository of sensor web resources for the research and application community in atmospheric science.