The Process-oriented Land Use and Tenure Ontology (PLUTO) was built as an alignment to the top-level ontology DOLCE for semantically integrating several data sets related to deforestation and land change trajectory in the Brazilian Amazon, and to publish and share these data sets as Linked Data .
The intended use of PLUTO is to spatio-temporally annotate land regions in the Brazilian Amazon and model land change trajectories related to them. This allows for analysis of different regions, and of the characteristics of the land change trajectories in each land region. The hypothesis is that these characteristics may be used to find similar pathways around the Brazilian Amazon and hence to help to predict the future of regions based on similar pathways found in other regions.
Combined with further data sets about regions (e.g. distance to market, distance to a river or road system, policies regarding the region) this analysis can reveal new knowledge about land change trajectories and help to create better policies for sustainability.
PLUTO is available for download as OWL, and it is presented in more detail in the following publication
- Tomi Kauppinen and Giovana Mira de Espindola. Ontology-Based Modeling of Land Change Trajectories in the Brazilian Amazon. In proceedings of Geoinformatik 2011 – GeoChange, Münster, Germany, June, 2011.