A partial ontology for forest inventory and mensuration

Keywords, restricted vocabularies (RVs), thesauri, and catalogues are introduced leading up to discussion of the need for full ontologies to describe the full logical and relational structure of e-information-objects (e-IOs) (data or docs). A re-ordered and (re-) structured NEFIS RV for forest inventory and mensuration (FIM) is (re-) presented, leading on to the description of new outline ontology for FIM. The fundamental problem of data incompatibility forest information systems is (re-) stated and the need for a forest standards conversion toolkit is (FSCTK) highlighted. FIM ontologies aid not only in the discovery of e-IOs on the WWW, but help to guide the analytical use of the FSCTK, possibly as a Web-service from the forest model archive (FMA).