The Gravity Data Ontology: Laying the Foundation for Workflow-Driven Ontologies

A workflow-driven ontology is an ontology that encodes disciplinespecific knowledge in the form of concepts and relationships and that facilitates the composition of services to create products and derive data. Early work on the development of such an ontology resulted in the construction of a gravity data ontology and the categorization of concepts: “Data,” “Method,” and “Product.” “Data” is further categorized as “Raw Data” and “Derived Data,” e.g., reduced data. The relationships that are defined capture inputs to and outputs from methods, e.g., derived data and products are output from methods, as well as other associations that are related to workflow computation. This paper describes the construction of a workflow-driven ontology that documents the methods and processes associated with gravity data and related products. In addition, the paper describes the progress done on the process to create workflow-driven ontologies, such that scientists are supported to create and validate such ontologies, while still enabling the automatic generation of executable workflow applications.