Initial notes

Definition within the field survey protocol context:

An intervention is a management process to maintain, restore or improve an ecosystem within a spatial area.

Interventions can take a range of forms, including fencing to protect remnant vegetation (Spooner et al. 2002), weed and pest animal control (Martin and van Klinken 2006; Reddiex et al. 2006), restoration and revegetation, re-introductions or translocations (Silcock et al. 2019), removal of watering points, controlled burns, nest box installation and community or landholder workshops (Capon et al. 2020).

Examples of interventions:

• weed and pest animal control

• controlled vegetation burns

• breeding programs

Below is a provisional definition of an Intervention class.

Class hierarchy

Conceptual model

Diagram 1

Diagram 2

Example usage:

Mapping planned vegetation burn to sosa:Actuation

Vegetation burn

Vegetation burn

Text from SOSA introduction paper

SOSA also includes classes and relations to model the behaviour of actuation devices, called actuators, that carry out (actuation) procedures to change the state of the world. The modelling of actuations is analogous to the modelling of observations and sampling as it relies on the same core structure. An Actuation is performed by an Actuator and yields a Result. An actuator is a device, software or agent that is used by, or implements, an (actuation) procedure that defines how changes of the state of the world are to be achieved. The actuator responds to an input, defined by the procedure and results in changes in the environment. The set of instructions for turning on and off an Internet of Things enabled light bulb is an example of a procedure. The activity of turning the lightbulb on/off is the actuation and the light bulb (or its socket) is the actuator. The difference with actuations, compared to observations, is that they may be used to model both, a record of how actuations have been performed (a log) and as how to interact with an actuation device (i.e., the procedure how to perform actuations) as well. The former is comparable to the use of the observation class, and the focus of SOSA, while the latter relies on additional axioms provided by the SSN extension to SOSA (i.e., the System concept and its properties implements/implementedBy) as well as on other ontologies and/or specifications that detail the functionality of an actuator further. For example, how much detail is provided to model inputs and outputs of the actuation procedure as well as the orchestration of multiple actuators is beyond the scope of both SOSA and SSN. Existing ontologies such as OWLS [24] and execution frameworks such as WSMX [9] can be used together with lower-level specifications such as the W3C Thing Description4 to model these details. With regards to SOSA, actuators are typically triggered by sensor outputs, i.e., observation results. The thing being acted on is the feature of interest of the actuation and the property being altered is an ActuatableProperty. To close the loop, such actuatable properties are typically also observable properties, e.g., the current state of the aforementioned light bulb. Put differently, the result of an actuation may be the stimulus of a new observation.

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With the bolded text above, we can apply this understanding to our planned vegetation burn example. Depending on what we are interested in observing (both before the burn and after), this becomes both the actuatable property and the observable property. For example, if we are interested in observing coarse woody debris at a site, we can perform a coarse woody debris survey before the planned burn and then again afterwards. The actuatable property is also coarse woody debris as it is the state that is being changed on the feature of interest.

Review of previous work on use of SOSA Actutator

Irrigation Ontology from AgroPortal

This ontology subclasses sosa:Actuation with a new class called IrrigationActuation.

http://agroportal.lirmm.fr/ontologies/IRRIG

See diagram for a depiction: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Irstea/irrig/master/diagrams/irrig.png

Browse by class: http://agroportal.lirmm.fr/ontologies/IRRIG?p=classes

The SOSA/SSN Ontology paper

Link: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/system/files/swj1804.pdf

There is an increasing importance of the Web of Things and smart instrumentation and environments more generally. Requirements for SSN included one to model actuation (it should be possible to model actuation functions of [systems].3 ) Actuation of a [system] is its ability to change something in its environment upon receiving a signal [26, §5.27]). The SOSA ontology pattern is therefore also extended to model sosa:Actuators, making some sosa:Actuations on some sosa:ActuatableProperty of a sosa:FeatureOfInterest. For example, the following snippet uses SSN to describe actuation #188 that has been made by actuator windowCloser #987 to act on the state of window #104.

It’s clear from this paper that the view of SOSA/SSN of actuations is from a sensor’s perspective.

Initial first impressions questions:

• is it a sampling activity?

• Is it a specialised version of Sampling?

• If it is a kind of Sampling, is it different enough to warrant a separate class to Sampling.

• Is there a difference between the act of sampling and applying something to a sample before sampling?

  • Sampling a cup of water versus adding sugar to water and then sampling

    • Is it part of the same sampling act?

  • Sample some soil, dry it in an oven and then observe.

    • Three different activities

    • Collect sample → dry it (some kind of intervention or process) → observe

• Shape of an Intervention is the same as a Sampling, just not sure if they are conceptually the same.

• It is definitely an activity on its own though.