Semantically Refining the Groundwater Markup Language (GWML2) with the Help of a Reference Ontology

Reference ontologies are intended to aid domain ontology design, identify gaps and inconsistencies in representations of domain information, and facilitate data interoperability.The application of a reference ontology to the water domain is untested.We present findings from using a first-order logic reference ontology for the water domain, the Hydro Foundational Ontology (HyFO), to identify and remedy semantic gaps and inconsistencies in the Groundwater Markup Language (GWML2), a data model for groundwater information with less detailed formal semantics.We express GWML2 as a logical extension of HyFO, thereby improving GWML2's compatibility with other hydro data models.We derive general desiderata for a "good" domain reference ontology in the geosciences and discuss the benefits one can expect from their use for the ontological analysis of geoscience data models.