Ontology models of the impacts of agriculture and climate changes on water resources: Scenarios on interoperability and information recovery

•Describes interoperability issues in an ontology engineering process.•Presents the design of a cross domain large ontology.•Presents experiences of using the ontology in an information recovery scenario.•Presents challenges and resources needed to work with domain specialists.

Agriculture is both highly dependent on water resources, and impacting on these resources. Regardless of advances in the area, the impacts of water scarcity and climatic changes on agriculture, as well as the impacts of agriculture on water resources, remain uncertain. Potentially, collaborative systems can support the management and information sharing of multifaceted and large scale data sources, providing valuable and indispensable information for research. However, these solutions rely on semantic interoperability, the construction of complex knowledge representation models, as well as information recovery. This work describes interoperability issues in the engineering process of the OntoAgroHidro, an ontology that represents knowledge about impacts of agricultural activities and climatic changes on water resources. The paper presents representative scenarios and questions, and discusses the reuse and integration of concepts using knowledge visualization techniques. Experiments on the information recovery scenario point out the potential and limitations of the OntoAgroHidro.