A semantic-aware data management system for seismic engineering research projects and experiments

The invention of the Semantic Web and related technologies is fostering a computing paradigm that entails a shift from databases to Knowledge Bases (KBs). There the core is the ontology that plays a main role in enabling reasoning power that can make implicit facts explicit; in order to produce better results for users. In addition, KB-based systems provide mechanisms to manage information and semantics thereof, that can make systems semantically interoperable and as such can exchange and share data between them. In order to overcome the interoperability issues and to exploit the benefits offered by state of the art technologies, we moved to KB-based system. This paper presents the development of an earthquake engineering ontology with a focus on research project management and experiments. The developed ontology was validated by domain experts, published in RDF and integrated into WordNet. Data originating from scientific experiments such as cyclic and pseudo dynamic tests were also published in RDF. We exploited the power of Semantic Web technologies, namely Jena, Virtuoso and VirtGraph tools in order to publish, storage and manage RDF data, respectively. Finally, a system was developed with the full integration of ontology, experimental data and tools, to evaluate the effectiveness of the KB-based approach; it yielded favorable outcomes.