Ontology-based Correlation of Resource Management Actions with Water Quality Data in South-east Queensland

This paper describes the ontology-based information management system “Health-eWaterways” that has been developed to link over 500 management actions to the environmental monitoring data being acquired through the SEQ HWP’s Ecosystem Health Monitoring Program. We describe the ontology that has been developed to link area-based Action Plans to specific regions, indicators and parameters. We also describe the Bing Maps/GoogleEarth interface that combines ontology-based querying with spatio-temporal querying to integrate the heterogeneous monitoring and management databases and visualize spatial and temporal trends in water quality. The ability to display Management Actions alongside related Ecosystem Health Indicators for a given catchment, enables policy makers to easily identify the impact of specific actions and investments and to adapt them accordingly. The ontology-based approach also enables the application of semantic and spatio-temporal inferencing to infer the flow-on effects of actions on sites that are downstream.