The ACORN-SAT Linked Climate Dataset

Submitted by Laurent Lefort on 01/31/2016 - 00:09

Tracking #: 1313-2525

Authors: 
Laurent Lefort
Armin Haller
Kerry Taylor
Geoffrey Squire
Peter Taylor
Dale Percival
Andrew Woolf

Responsible editor: 
Oscar Corcho

Submission type: 
Dataset Description
Abstract: 
In 2012 the Australian Bureau of Meteorology published a dataset, ACORN-SAT, containing the homogenised daily temperature observations of 112 locations throughout Australia for the last 100 years. The dataset employs the latest analysis techniques and takes advantage of newly digitised observational data to monitor climate variability and change in Australia. The observations in ACORN-SAT were initially published only as comma separated values, whereas the metadata was published in a PDF report. In 2013 we converted the metadata and the observation data into RDF and published the result as Linked Open Data, accessible online via a pilot government linked data service built on the Linked Data API. In this article we describe the process of transforming the original tabular data into a Linked Sensor Data Cube [12] based on the W3C Semantic Sensor Network ontology [5] and the W3C RDF Data Cube vocabulary [6]. We further discuss how the dataset has since been used and interlinked with near-real time weather observations for the 112 sensing locations of the ACORN-SAT that are published by the Bureau of Meteorology. Both the original ACORN-SAT dataset and the weather observation data are accessible online at lab.environment.data.gov.au.
Full PDF Version: 
PDF icon swj1313.pdf
Previous Version: 
The ACORN-SAT Linked Climate Dataset
Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
By Marta Sabou submitted on 04/May/2016
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

This is a re-submission of a manuscript which was previously assessed as ready for publications pending "Minor Revisions". Please refer to my previous review for comments on how the work presented satisfies the evaluation criteria of SWJ.

The authors have provided a detailed cover letter where they answered all my questions. Therefore, I recommend that this new version of the paper is ready for publication. When preparing the final submissions, the authors should fix the following minor (yet important) issues:

* Section 2.2: "bom-station:Station and acorn-site:Site defined as ssn:Station" => based on Fig 1 probably you mean "ssn:Platform" and not "ssn:Station"

* the "dul" prefix is not listed in Table 1

* Fig 2 contains several concepts with prefix "acorn-deployment", which based on Table 2 should be "acorn-deploy"=> please align figure and table

* Section 4: The sentence "There are a number of use cases ..." is too abstract. Please provide a few lines about the mentioned use-cases/opportunities to satisfy reader curiosity.

* the acronym SSN is introduced at least twice: I suggest to introduce it only once and then use it to refer to the corresponding ontology through the paper (there is no need to mention the full name of the ontology once the acronym was introduced)

* different fonts are used for URIs (especially on page 5) => please use style consistently

* Sections 4 and 5 all contain a single sub-section (4.1 and 5.1) => typically there is not much point in introducing sub-sections if there is only one, so authors should consider whether these subsection headings are really needed

Review #2
By Danh Le Phuoc submitted on 05/May/2016
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

The dataset is available for a number years, and it has been attracted a lot of attentions from the community. I'm happy with new revision, I think it's time the paper gets accepted and published.

Review #3
By Raphael Troncy submitted on 22/Jun/2016
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

I hereby acknowledge that the authors have fully taken into account my
comments and suggestions and I recommend now the publication of the
paper "The ACORN-SAT Linked Climate Dataset" as-in in the Semantic Web
Journal.

I have in particular appreciated the new section 4. As a minor comment,
don't create a subsection 5.1 since there are no other subsections.

Despite the usage of numerous prefixes, I strongly suggest the authors
to register those together with the acorn ontology definitions on the
LOV registry. For example, a simple search for the concept
"Observation", http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/terms?q=observation does
not provide any definition from the acorn-sat vocabulary (nor "Station"
does provide answer from the bom vocabulary,
http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/terms?q=Station).