Abstract

Metadata for hydrologic models is rarely organized in machine-readable forms. This lack of formal metadata is important because it limits the ability to catalog, identify, attribute, and understand unique model software; ultimately, it hinders the ability to reproduce past computational studies. Researchers have recently proposed an ontology for scientific software metadata called OntoSoft for addressing this problem. The objective of this research is to evaluate OntoSoft for organizing the metadata associated with a data pre-processing software workflow used in association with the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrologic model. This is accomplished by exploring what metadata are available from online resources and how this metadata aligns with the OntoSoft Ontology. The results suggest that past efforts to document this software resulted in capturing key model metadata in unstructured files that could be …

Date

June 1, 2017

Authors

Bakinam T Essawy, Jonathan L Goodall, Hao Xu, Yolanda Gil

Journal

Environmental Modelling & Software

Volume

92

Pages

317-329

Publisher

Elsevier