Towards a Digital Ocean Ontology Using the OApIS Approach

Improved knowledge of the ocean is fundamental to anticipate environmental disasters and control human activity's impact on climate and biodiversity. The current efforts to digitize the ocean through sensors and monitoring systems allows for the implementation of digital twin technology, as a means to realize a multitude of benefits, such as overfishing reduction and prevention, marine pollution prediction, climate change adaptation and marine spatial planning promotion. Therefore, our research group intended to present a scientific contribute to the development of Ocean digital twins sphere of knowledge. However, as we came to understand, during our state-of-the art review, the application of the digital twin technology for such purposes remains largely unexplored and unrealized, with only one notable european ongoing project. The lack of scientific basis in the domain shifted our focus towards the development of a Digital Ocean Ontology, capable of sustaining future advancements in ocean digital twins implementation. In order to derive a Digital Ocean Ontology, we employed the OAPiS approach, a data-driven methodology. The application of the method resulted in a terminology catalog with 109 terms, 27 entities and 82 properties from which we derived a Digital Ocean ontology with 16 high level entities, which is presented as this work's contribution.