Enriching environmental software model interfaces through ontology-based tools

Common practice has proven that software implementations of environmental models are seldom reused by broader communities or in different modelling frameworks. One of the reasons for this situation is the poor semantics of model interfaces. Model interfaces embrace a critical amount of the modellers’ knowledge, but their software implementations can be considered as ‘poor reflections’ of modellers’ perceptions, as they fail to represent the complexity of model assumptions in software terms. This paper addresses the problem by adopting an ontology-driven approach that aims to enrich software model interfaces with advanced semantics.