Common Vocabulary - discipline

[SiBell]

Intro

Following previous discussions we appear to have come to the agreement that our observations can have a discipline property, an array of disciplines that the observation would be useful for.

Example observation:

{
  "madeBySensor": "thermistor-abc",
  "hasResult": {
    "value": 21.2,
    "unit": "deg_c"
  },
  "observedProperty": "AirTemperature",
  "hasFeatureOfInterest": "EarthAtmosphere",
  "discipline": ["Meteorology", "Climatology"]
}

Aim

To agree on a common list of disciplines.

Why

Let's say all 6 urban observatories deploy weather stations across their respective cities. The sensors hosted on these weather stations will be recording observations that are particularly useful to certain disciplines. For example, observations of air temperature are useful to Meteorology and Climatology. Observations of rainfall accumulation would also be of use to Hydrology. If every observatory picks disciplines from a common dictionary it becomes far easier for end users to pull equivalent data from each observatory, e.g. to find out which city has the wettest weather!

As an example, the following query will return observations of air temperature relevant to Meteorologists. By adding the discipline as a query parameter it filters out all the air temperature observations that aren't relevant to this discipline, e.g. the air temperature of a room in a building, or inside an air-conditioning duct.

GET https://api.urbanobservatory.com/observations?observedProperty=AirTemperature&discipline=Meterology

Tasks

I'll start an initial list below. Just comment below if you think any need modifying or removing, likewise if you have any more that you'd like to add.

Wherever possible please try to reuse or reference disciplines already defined in other vocabularies.

[SiBell]

The QUDT's set of disciplines was an obvious starting point for this list. I've picked out the ones that are most relevant to us. However I've had to add a few of my own because I couldn't find an appropriate category in the QUDT list. If we want to use these we'll need to write our own definition. I'm struggling to find another vocabulary we can pull from.

We've partly discussed this already on this page.

Annoyingly I can't seem to find working links to individual QUDT disciplines. For example, http://qudt.org/vocab/discipline/AtmosphericChemistry isn't found despite it being listed as the JSON-LD @id. Also most of them don't even have a description explaining them.

N.B. if you look at the broader property of each QUDT discipline in the JSON-LD representation you'll notice that many disciplines fall into a broader discipline, e.g. AtmosphericChemistry and Climatology both fall into AtmosphericScience. I've favoured using the more specific disciplines rather than the broader ones. Please comment if you think this is the wrong approach.

Also many of these QUDT Disciplines sound relevant, e.g. ThermalControl until you look at their JSON-LD representation and realise their broad discipline is SpaceSystemEngineering.

Discipline	Notes	Equivalent to
AtmosphericChemistry	Use this for Air Quality observations	QUDT's AtmosphericChemistry
Climatology	This is a bit of a weird one, as almost every Meteorology observation could also be relevant to Climatology.	QUDT's Climatology
Communications	Useful for Sheffield's work on mapping LoRaWAN coverage. If a sensor platform, e.g. a weather station, reports its RSSI, should this observation be tagged as Meteorology or Communications?	QUDT's Communications
Ecology	E.g. bird counts, tree health	none found
Energy		QUDT's Energy
Geography	Too broad?	none found
Hydrology	Freshwater only?	none found
Meteorology		QUDT's Meteorology
Structures	e.g. bridge vibration	QUDT's Structures
SocialScience		QUDT's SocialScience
SoftwareEngineering	E.g. if we start to output diagnostics from our own servers as observations.	QUDT's SoftwareEngineering
Transport	e.g. vehicle counts, no. of bus passengers, train locations	none found

[SiBell]

We need a Diagnostics or Instrumental discipline.