Research On The Construction And Applications Of The Toponym Ontology Based On The Topography Thesaurus

As the core technology of the third era internet which is the Semantic Web, ontology is holding the balance on the aspects of sharing of data and information, semantic consistency expression, knowledge obtaining and management and so on. But the cost of construction of the ontology is very high and it costs both a large amount of manpower and material resources and a specially long constructing period. So domain ontologies, public ontologies are more. It blocks the popularization and application of the Semantic Web at a certain degree. For solving the bottleneck problems, the experts and scholars put forward many techniques and construction rules after years of research. In the paper, the author brings forward the way of toponym ontology construction based on the topography thesaurus/thematic thesaurus, which is applied in the domain research. The author wishes it can make a advantageous complementarity to the toponym ontology theories and applications and accelerate the development and advancement of the the domain.The main contents are as follows.1. Toponym ontology basic relations management and spatial relations extending. The topography thesaurus includes rich basic relations, such as grade relation, equated relation and correlative relation, which should be inherited in the construction of the toponym ontology. At the same time, aiming at the problem there is no or less spatial relations in the ontology constructed based on the topography thesaurus, spatial relations need to be added to the toponym ontology. In the paper three kinds of most important relations are extended which are topology relations, direction relation and distance relation.2. The construction of the toponym ontology. The topography thesaurus is a topography domain thesaurus including strict concept and relation definition which is organized by the topography domain experts and scholars who spend lots of time and energy. In the paper, the toponym ontology is constructed based on the topography thesaurus which needs domain thesaurus syncretic treatment and strict mapping conversion to the toponym ontology for solving the problems of toponym multivocal quality, basic relations illegibility and so on can effectively.3. The checkout and maintenance of the toponym ontology. In the paper, the toponym ontology constructed is checkout on the integrality, extensibility, consistency, and validated with instances. The updating and maintenance of the toponym ontology is based on Wordnet, which will be upgraded and maintained constantly with its later upgraded editions.4. The formalization description and expression of the toponym ontology.①The descriptions and expressions of the classes and basic relations, which mainly include concepts, terms, grade relation and equated relation when the topography thesaurus is transformed to the toponym ontology.②The descriptions and expressions of the instances. Zhengzhou city is the application area of the research. So, Zhengzhou city of Henan province is described as an example in the section.③The descriptions and expressions of the spatial relations. In the paper spatial relations are described as the attribute and three kinds of relations are described with models, such as topology relation, direction relation and distance relation.5. The applications of the toponym ontology. Three aspects of application about the toponym ontology are discussed in the paper, such as toponym combination and match query, place/toponym dissimilarity analysis and toponym space-time evolvement analysis. Toponym combination and match query which conditions are the toponym semantic styles queries synthetically at the restriction conditions of simple style, intersecting style and union style and it supplies a new way for the toponym query domain. Place/toponym dissimilarity analysis distinguishes the places which have the same toponym from the aspects of superior regionalism, coordinates, orientations, and other particular informations and it avoides the semantic multivocal quality of the place/toponym dissimilarity phenomena at a certain degree. Toponym space-time evolvement analysis exhibits the development and change process of history from time and spatial position change and it makes users know and master the toponym development process conveniently.