Lost in Translation - Mediating between distributed environmental resources.

Implementing distributed environmental modelling infrastructures supporting domain experts to discover, compose, share, and execute environmental models is subject of the ENVISION (Environmental Services Infrastructure With Ontologies) project. In this paper we focus on one specific aspect of distributed environmental models: how can we open up these infrastructures to include the wide range of data formats in the environmental modelling domain into the Web service compositions? We present the annotation pattern as solution to provide extensible resource descriptions based on flexible ontology languages. Model References link between different representations of resource descriptions, while Domain References link to terms in the common domain taxonomies. The use of shared ontologies minimizes the risk of semantic conflicts due to misinterpretations, and supports the mediation between distributed environmental resources.