Spatial Knowledge Base Based On Geo-Ontology

Since 1990s, Ontology has been introduced into the information science domain. Recently, Ontology becomes more and more important as it is applied to knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence, semantic web and so on.In the new century we take the digital information as resource and Internet as connection artery, huge geography information resources have been generated along with the development of digital projects such as digital earth and the development of global observation of the earth.But Geography Information System (GIS) still are quite weak at spatial knowledge representation and organization, that is, lack the semantic info of the abundant data. As a result, current GIS have flaws in its knowledge representation and query aspect. At the same time, because the difference of concept model, data structure, software or hardware, different GIS have formed isolated information islands. And this kind of situation has been in the way of geography information resource sharing and interoperation.Along with the development of Ontology in GIS domain, the advantages of Geo-Ontology in the knowledge representation, sharing and interoperation of spatial information have caused attentions greatly. But still, current research of Geo-Ontology is not deep enough, didn't pay enough attention to spatial character and spatial relationship on the representation of Geo-Ontology. Also, the theoretic research of Geo-Ontology is hot, but it's seldom practically used. This paper focuses on the formalized representation of Geo-Ontology and the research of spatial environment knowledge base based on Geo-Ontology. The main work is listed as following:Firstly, this paper analyzes different kinds of Ontology description language and construction methods based on the research of related Ontology theories. Concrete examples are used to explain the semantic representation ability of OWL, and a framework of Geo-Ontology design method is proposed.Secondly, combining the characters of Geo-Ontology, we focus on Geo-Ontology formalism representation mechanism while we pay particularly attentions to the spatial characters of geography object. We formalistically represent Geo-Ontology on geography classification, spatial geometry, spatial relationship (topological relationship, directional relationship), and spatial hierarchy relationship by using OWL. Thirdly, this paper proposes an architecture of spatial knowledge database which is based on Geo-Ontology, analyzes each module of the knowledge base and discusses the function and meaning of the Geo-Ontology.Finally, this paper develops a simple OWL Ontology parser based on .Net platform, and combined with MapX to build up a visual prototype and carry out a preliminary experiment about Geo-Ontology applications.