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Official repository for Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) Ontologies
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evapotranspiration subClassOf thickness? #227

Open cmungall opened 3 years ago

cmungall commented 3 years ago

Aligning concepts like evapotranspiration in SWEET with the concept with the same name in ENVO (which is a process)

Trying to make sense of:

image

Is it really correct to say that potential evapotranspiration is a thickness?

I suppose according to WP, PET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_evaporation can be measured in mm/month, so it is in some sense a kind of thickness. So it seems the SWEET conception of properties like thickness is very inclusive? I think I would make sense to document and articulate the definitions here so that consistent classification decisions can be made here, and we could determine if things like evapotranspiration subClassOf thickness is intended or a mistake

graybeal commented 3 years ago

So I think in English the usage could go either way: something was caused by evapotranspiration, or there were 3mm of evapotranspiration. (No idea if scientists reject one of those sentences.)

SWEET has this kind of thing throughout, where the choice made is not consistent with my expectations and definitions, but I couldn't argue it was technically wrong. And without definitions, who's to say?

From a modeling perspective, though, wouldn't it be more sensible if it were a process, the result of which was a thickness of fluid? (Like we don't say "snow" is a thickness, we say "snow cover" is a thickness.) I'd vote for that. So that would remove all the subclass declarations about it (default unit, measure of, has unit, quantity, and quantitative property) and leave 'study of' some physics.

r0sek commented 1 year ago

I think Evapotranspiration and Potential Evapotranspiration are classified incorrectly.

Evapotranspiration is a process and is expressed as the rate of some depth of water loss over time, eg. mm per unit time. The depth or thickness is a measurement of the amount of water (in the substrate) that is transformed into water vapor by the evapotranspiration process, not the thickness of the resulting water vapor; see the Units section of the FAO chapter on evapotranspiration https://www.fao.org/3/X0490E/x0490e04.htm for further explanation. The same is true for potential evapotranspiration.

I searched for "evapotranspiration boundary layer", which I was imagining could be a boundary layer of water vapor that occurs over crops or forests, etc. and is specifically attributed to evapotranspiration, and would then be a type of thickness, but couldn't find anything. Most scholarly articles describing that phenomena appear to simply use the term "boundary layer".

SWEET currently has phenomena > biological phenomena > transpiration and physical process > state change > vaporization > evaporation. Evapotranspiration is a combination of the two, but I think should be considered a biological process as "transpiration" occurs in plants but is only combined with "evaporation" in situations where the two cannot be quantifiably distinguished.