An Ontology for Representing and Querying Semantic Trajectories in the Maritime Domain.

This paper presents the design of an ontology for the representation of enriched semantic trajectories in the maritime domain. The ontology supports vessel trajectories, at different levels of detail, enriched with vessel characteristics, weather information and events, as well as topological and proximity relations to geographical areas of interest (such as ports and protected areas). The paper describes how raw data from diverse data sources are integrated in order to produce enriched semantic trajectories, represented as linked data in RDF, in compliance with the proposed ontology. Moreover, the added-value of the ontology is demonstrated by means of semantic queries that retrieve information about moving vessels and their trajectories using complex criteria. The linked data and our ontology are publicly available as five star linked open data, offering a valuable resource to the research community.