OWL Representation of the Common Information Sharing Environment Data Scheme for the Maritime Domain

The Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE) is the result of a collaborative initiative aiming at promoting automated information sharing among maritime surveillance authorities in Europe. It provides a decentralized framework and a data model for point-to-point information exchange across sectors and borders. The exploitation of the CISE data model is however limited by its serialization via an XML schema. Such a serialization is known to be insufficient to provide semantic interoperability, ontology-based data access, and reasoning capabilities to the different systems relying on CISE. This paper presents an OWL representation of the two main versions of CISE: the CISE data model (current version, 1.5.3) and its extended version (eCISE) that enhances the CISE maritime vocabulary and expands its scope to include land surveillance and operational information exchange. These ontologies are the outcome of an improved process of transforming XML schemes (XSD) into OWL and of validation and correction efforts by domain experts. Both generated ontologies and the XML to OWL converter are publicly available.