Research On Methods Of Semantic Representation And Query Of Geographic Information Via Geo-ontology

Ontology as a philosophical theory has been introduced into the field of geographic information science (GIScience for short), and further extended to geo-ontology. In recent years, geo-ontology research has been paid more attention by scholars from the fields of computer science and GIScience.It can be used to the semantic representation and interoperability of geographic information, the organization and integration of geospatial data, geographic information discovery and spatial query, the wayfinding and so on.In this paper, from the start of the theory and method of geo-ontology, the intention is to express the semantics of geographic information formally, as well as semantic query based on geo-ontology. Around this purpose, this paper carried out the following work.Firstly, the progress on geo-ontology is systematically reviewed.With respect to geo-ontology theory, its definition, levels and types,composition and establishment have been described and analyzed.Meanwhile the application research based on geo-ontology in geographic information semantic issues have been described and analyzed.Secondly, a geo-ontology method has been proposed for the semantic representation of geographic information, which is based on the analysis of the semantic heterogeneity and its generation causes.In this paper, geo-spatial information is roughly classified into the top-level geographic object information and the bottom-level class information of geographic object (also called geographic class information).The geographic object information represents all the geographic objects in the real world;and the geographic class information representing the class information associated with the geographic objects.The method includes two aspects,namely the semantic representation of geographic object information and the semantic representation of geographic class information.They have been respectively demonstrated by some practical examples.Thirdly, an extended method about geographic information query based on geo-ontology has been proposed after a review of the existing query methods and their shortcomings are pointed out. In this proposed method, the data extracted from geospatial databases have been set up application ontology. Then the application ontology and the corresponding domain ontology are fused to form the enriched ontology, which as a knowledge base to provide semantic ontology reasoning capabilities, and then as a semantic middle layer to map the spatial database and query system.Then a prototype system with the functions of geo-ontology modeling and geo-ontology query has been designed. And a certain city geographic objects and geographic data are founded as a case study.Finally, this paper makes a summary about the achievements and shortcomings, and presents some issues for further work.