An Approach to Facilitate the Integration of Hydrological Data by means of Ontologies and Multilingual Thesauri

The general concern about environmental issues has involved the creation of national and international policies that require, at a technical level, the analysis, merging and processing of data obtained from very different sources. This paper proposes an approach for the integration of hydrological data that is based on the use of a multilingual ontology to facilitate the mapping across the local data models in the different sources. The novelty of the proposal is that the multilingual domain ontology is generated automatically by the merging and pruning of existing lexical ontologies. This approach has been tested in the context of the European Water Framework directive for the development of reporting applications in cross-border scenarios. Nevertheless, this approach could be easily extended to other domains.