About

The Spatial Decision Support (SDS) Knowledge Portal is developed to help people gain knowledge about SDS, and to help practitioners, researchers and decision makers involved in an actual planning and decision making process find relevant information and resources for solving their specific problems. The objectives of the SDS Knowledge Portal project are as follows:

Developing a systematic representation of the body of knowledge in the field of SDS;
Promoting semantic clarity of commonly used terms within the SDS user community, in the areas including decision process, methods and techniques, functionalities of Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS);
Organizing and facilitating access to a representative set of SDS resources including literature, tools and models, data sources, case studies, etc.

Learn more about the conceptual framework for SDS by watching a short video.

Under the hood of the SDS Conceptual Framework:
The conceptual framework on the SDS Knowledge Portal is implemented by a set of ontologies. Ontologies are good for the formal representation of large scope, complex conceptual domains. We have developed a set of SDS ontologies to:

Organize and formally represent the knowledge in the field of SDS
Enable easy access to SDS components
Improve the robustness of the conceptual framework for SDS
Facilitate interoperability with other existing conceptual models through standardization of terms

Practical definition of "ontology":
A domain specific ontology is constructed on the basis of a controlled vocabulary whose meaning is agreed upon by the members of a particular user community. An ontology is a classification system, containing the conceptual categories in this domain, and for each category, the defining attributes of this category, and the various relations that this category bears to other categories. A category may have instances sharing the same defining attributes and relations of this category; the difference in their attribute values make them distinct individuals.

Ontology language used in this project:
OWL

The SDS ontologies are stored in Allegrograph RDFstore, and accessed live when you browse or search the content on the SDS Knowledge Portal via web services.