Construction Of Domain Ontology Orienting From Coupled Human And Natural System Nitrogen Flux Calculation

Human activities have intensively altered the nitrogen cycle of terrestrial ecosystems, increasing system productivity, but also bringing environmental and health problems. With the strengthening of human activity disturbances, the structure and function of natural ecosystems have been breaking, forming cropland, urban, pasture, industry and other functional systems, further self-organizing and upgrading to a coupled human and natural system (CHANS). Nowadays, as the rapid development of global economy, Nitrogen pollution is becoming more and more serious. So, quantifying Nitrogen flux in the system to utilize Nitrogen reasonably, satisfy human requirements as well as decrease negative effects turns to science challenges which must be solved in21st century for human beings.At present, nitrogen flux calculation mainly depends on quasi-empirical models which quantify nitrogen fluxes using empirical formulas based on various kinds of collected parameters. However, quasi-empirical model has suffered from several limitations in its application, including:(1) completeness of calculation cannot be ensured due to the lacking of variables;(2) uncertainty analysis is difficult;(3) data sharing is lack of standardization. Ontology is a semantic model to describe concepts and their relations. It can unify and enrich the description of data to improve the sharing of data. In addition, the reasoning mechanism and hierarchy of ontology could provide automatic reasoning function for quasi-empirical models to find out unavailable variables and conduct uncertainty analysis.This paper constructs a domain ontology for quasi-empirical models of nitrogen flux calculation (NFCO), and proposes a framework of automatic reasoning and uncertainty analysis based on NFCO. The NFCO and framework would improve the quality of CHANS nitrogen flux calculation, build the solid foundation for establishing CHANS nitrogen cycle database.