Semantic mediation of an integrated assessment tool for agricultural systems

Semantic mediation based on ontologies has been proposed as a method to achieve integration in multi-disciplinary and multi-scale integrated assessment tools. In the development of an integrated assessment tool, SEAMLESS-IF, agricultural models, data sources, scenarios and indicators had to be integrated in one conceptual schema, providing the shared definition of concepts and their relationships. This paper describes the different methods used in the semantic mediation of the various cases (i.e. models, data sources, scenarios and indicators) in SEAMLESS-IF. By contrasting the methods, this paper argues that the method used for semantic mediation has to be flexibly adapted to the case and the researchers involved. Common aspects in the semantic mediation are i. the organization in several prototypes, which where gradually improved, ii. a collaborative approach to discuss ontology content between domain experts and knowledge engineers and iii. the editing of the ontology itself was done by a knowledge engineer and not by a whole community of researchers. To succeed in building coherent and comprehensive ontologies, these common aspects (i.e. prototypes, collaborative approach, ontology editing) need to be adapted to the case (i.e. researchers, available information, mediation question).