AIMS

Network of Fisheries Ontologies

The network of fisheries ontologies (OWL/RDF) was created as a part of the NeOn Project. It covers the following areas:

Note! The ontologies published here are draft versions and should not be used as official expressions of any of the classifications sytems modeled.

 

Water areas

The world water areas may be divided up in several regions, depending on the needs and on the point of view. For example, it is common to talk about Pacific Ocean, but if you are interested in environmental issues you would like to distinguish the "insular pacific-awayan" from the rest of the ocean. Also, if you are interested in economic or legal issues, you will distinguish the territorial waters and the exclusive economic zones of countries. 

FAO areas for statistical reporting

For the purpose of data collection and statistical reporting, the water areas in the world are organized into a system of 27 FAO areas also called “FAO division areas”, which consist of major areas, divided into sub-areas, each divided into divisions, and these finally into sub-divisions.

Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ)

Under the law of the sea (Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, concluded in 1982), an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is a sea zone over which a state has special rights with regards to the exploration and use of marine resources. We provide links between EEZ, FAO divisions and countries.

Data source: Reference Tables Online Browser ("Water area" -> "Jurisdiction Area" -> "Country Exclusive Economic Zone").  

 

Large Marine Ecosystems (LME)

Regions of the world's oceans characterized by distinct bathymetry, hydrography, productivity, and trophically dependent populations. The system of LMEs has been developed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to identify areas of the oceans for conservation purposes.

Data in this ontology is not updated: please refer to the Reference Tables Online Browser (under "Water area" -> "Environmental Area" -> "Large Marine Ecosystem"), or directly to the NOAA website.

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Species

Species are central to any work related to fisheries, and many views are possible on them, depending on the interest and point of view. For example, one may be interested in their biological features, their commercial importance, or in the way they appear in the market as commodities. These points of view are captured in the ontologies we have produced.

ISSCAAP classification 

The International Standard Statistical Classification for Aquatic Animals and Plants (ISSCAAP) classifies biological entities according to their commercial value. This classification can be taken as a classification of species and a classification of commodities, therefore we provide links to both ontologies. See: Reference Tables Online Browser ("Biological Entity" -> "Commerical Group of Species" -> "ISSCAAP group" and "ISSCAAP division").

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Taxonomic classification

A list of species relevant to fisheries is maintained in the ASFIS list, where each species is provided with a taxonomic code, and an 3-alpha code. The ASFIS list is then organized hierarchically, as one can brose in: Reference Tables Online Browser ("Biological Entity" -> "Taxonomic Entity").   

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Aquatic resources

From a biological point of view, a stock comprises all the individuals of fish in an area, which are part of the same reproductive process. From a biological point of view, it may be difficult to decide if a given population of fish is a stock or not, for this reason we use the term "aquatic resources", to emphasize a rousource management perspective. The simplifying, operational definition we assume is that a stock is identified by one or more species and one or more water areas where they can be found.
 

Aquatic resources observation

Aquatic resources are "observed" regularly by competent bodies, in order to assess their status and condition. The resulting aquatic resource observation often usually also include information about the aquatic resource biology and habitat.

 

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 Land areas: Geopolitical ontology

The FAO geopolitical ontology is a resource developed and maintained by FAO, as part of the FAO Country Profile web site. It contains information about countries and groups of countries, including code lists, names in various languages and the historical dimension of evolution of countries (e.g., West Germany is a "predecessor" or Germany). The geopolitical ontology and related services have been developed to facilitate data exchange and sharing through standards, among systems managing information about countries and/or regions. 

More information about the geopolitical ontology.   

Quick link to the geopolitical ontology:

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Commodities: ISSCFC and HS classifications

A commodity is anything for which there is a demand and a market, and which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across the market – i.e. primary goods such as oil, gold, sugar, milk, copper, rice, fish.

We present here the International Standard Statistical Classification of Fishery Commodities (ISSCFC) and the Harmonized System (HS) classifications of commodities.

Data source: Reference Tables Online Browser ("Fishery Commodity").   

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Vessels: GT, GRT and ISSCFC classifications

In international law, as well as in practice, several systems of tonnage measurement have existed side by side. Here we include the classification called Gross Register Tonnage (GRT), as defined by the Oslo Convention (1947); the classification called Gross Tonnage (GT) as defined by the 1969 London Convention; and the International Standard Statistical Classification of Fishery Vessels by Vessel Types (ISSCFV), based on the type of gear used by the vessels, approved by the CWP in 1984 is adopted.

Data source: Reference Tables Online Browser ("Vessel Size categories" and "Vessel type").   

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Gear: ISSCFG classification

The type of gear installed on a vessel determines the type of fish that can be caught, therefore it is often used in statistical collections to determine the fleet power. The main classification of gear types is the International Standard Statistical Classification of Fishing Gear (ISSCFG), adopted in 1980 during the 10th Session of the CWP.

Data source: Reference Tables Online Browser ("Gear type"). 

  1. v1.3 OWL Model: Browse - Download
  2. v1.3 Data:  Browse - Download 
  3. Previous versions

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AGROVOC

The AGROVOC thesaurus is is a multilingual resource designed to cover the terminology of all subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment). For testing its inclusion in the network of fisheries ontologies, we used a fragment of it.

Originally a thesaurus, AGROVOC is also being reengineered into a semantically-rich form. However, for our network a previous version of AGROVOC-OWL is used, in which thesaurus entries are converted into classes, and their names are linguistically significant (as opposed to having numberic IDs).

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ASFA thesaurus

The ASFA Thesaurus contains the subject descriptors used to index the records which are contained in the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) bibliographic database. ASFA is an abstracting and indexing service covering the world's literature on the science, technology, management, and conservation of marine, brackish water, and freshwater resources and environments, including their socio-economic and legal aspects.

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Links: ASFA and AGROVOC

This ontology contains the alignment between ASFA and AGROVOC, done according a criterion of "exact match". 

The alignment was done using the methods: fr.inrialpes.exmo.align.impl.method.StringDistAlignment through the NeOn Alignment API. All correspondences in this alignment have 1.0 confidence measure.

The ASFA version assumed is asfad.owl, the reengineering Thesaurus2ABox made by Aldo Gangemi for NeOn.
The Agrovoc version used is an old Agrovoc Thesaurus2TBox from 2004, made by Aldo Gangemi. The reason is that the alignment method used needs linguistically meaningful class names as in ASFA, while in the current version of Agrovoc the names are explicit only in the label.

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Links: Species (ASFA) and Taxonomy of species

 
This is an alignment between the species contained in ASFA, and the species contained in the taxonomy of species included in the network.
 
Note: Data is currently undergoing manual assessment, it will be published soon.
 

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Links: Commodities (ASFA) and Fisheries Commodities

This is an alignment between the commodities contained in ASFA, and those contained in the HS and ISSCFC classifications, as represented in the fisheries network of ontologies. 

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Links: Species (ASFA) "caught by" Fishing gears

This is an alignment between the fish species contained in ASFA, and those the gears used for their capture, according to a relations "cought by".  

  • Species (ASFA) "cought by" Fishing gears (data is to be be published soon).

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Links: Species (Taxonomy) "found in" FAO water areas

This is an alignment between the fish species contained in ontology about taxonomy of species, and the ontology of FAO water areas, according to a relation of "found in".   

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Links: Species (Taxonomy) "in the vicinity of" countries

 
This alignment between aquatic species and countries is meant to make explict a notion of "proximity" between aquatic animals and the countries land areas. This alignment is a test and should be taken as providing reliable information about species distribution, or about countries' capture.

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Links: Species (Taxonomy) "used for" Fisheries commodities

This alignment between the aquatic species contained in the ontology about taxonomic information, and the ontology of fisheries commodities, according to a relation of "used for".

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Links: Species (Taxonomy) "caught by" Fishing gears

This is an alignment between the fish species contained in the ontology with taxonomic information, and the fishing gears used for their capture, according to a relations "cought by".  

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