Geospatial semantics

1996

The word 'semantics' or 'semantic' is, in the context of data modeling, the meanings of objects or concepts in the physical or abstract world (Date, 1995). Here, it refers to aspatial and atemporal properties of geographic features. The word is chosen instead of thematical or topical because people interpret reality somewhat subjectively in ways meaningful to their cognition and perspectives.

The Annals of Regional Science, 1999

Technical interoperability has provided geographic information communities with substantial improvements for constructing GIS capable of very low friction and dynamic data exchanges. These technical advances stand to provide substantial advantages for sharing geographic information, however reaping these advantages in highly heterogeneous operational and organizational environments requires the understanding and resolution of semantic di¨erences. While the OpenGIS consortium has made important progress on technical interoperability, semantic interoperability still remains an unpassed hurdle for e¨orts to share geographic information across organizational and institutional boundaries at the local, regional, and other levels. Identifying and resolving semantic interoperability issues is especially pertinent for data sharing and considering future developments of standards. This paper presents an overview of semantic interoperability and through case studies shows the breadth and depth of issues and approaches in di¨erent countries and at di¨erent levels of organizations. These cases illustrate the importance of developing¯exible approaches to practical data sharing problems that merge semantical with technical considerations. Based on our examinations of semantic issues and approaches in ongoing research projects, we propose cognitive, computer science, and socio-technical frameworks for examining semantic interoperability.

Journal on data semantics III, 2005

2013

The emergence of the Semantic Web and its underlying knowledge technologies has brought changes in data han- dling. Transferring expert knowledge to machines through knowledge formalization provides us the required support in managing huge datasets like the information in the World Wide Web. In the field of geospatial technology semantic technologies not only entail the capability to achieve higher degree of data integration but also infer semantics to discover new and hidden knowledge. This is of particular interest in the field of archaeology, where complex interrelations among heterogeneous datasets exist. Although researches on seman- tics are active areas in geospatial communities, their initial use is mainly for spatial data integration. This article tries to go one step further and imply semantics for spatial knowl- edge discovery through spatial built-ins within SWRL and SPARQL. The work resembles the approach of the Open Geo- spatial Consortium (OGC) to define standards for...

2012

The Geosciences and Geography are not just yet another application area for semantic technologies. The vast heterogeneity of the involved disciplines ranging from the natural sciences to the social sciences introduces new challenges in terms of interoperability. Moreover, the inherent spatial and temporal information components also require distinct semantic approaches. For these reasons, geospatial semantics, geo-ontologies, and semantic interoperability have

2008

Geospatial information integration is not a trivial task. An integrated view must be able to describe various heterogeneous data sources and its interrelation to obtain shared conceptualizations. Up-to-date, there are different and public ontologies for many domains and applications. Ontology engineering is rapidly becoming a mature discipline, which has produced various tools and methodologies for building and managing ontologies. However, even with a clearly defined engineering methodology, building a large ontology remains a challenging, time-consuming and error-prone task, since it forces ontology builders to conceptualize their expert knowledge explicitly and to re-organize it in typical ontological categories such as concepts, properties and axioms. In this paper, an approach to conceptualize the geographic domain is described. As a result of this conceptualization, we propose a semantic method for geospatial information integration. This consists of providing semantic descriptions, which explicitly describe the properties and relations of geographic objects represented by concepts, while the behavior describes the objects semantics. Summing up, this work presents a methodology allowing integrate and share geospatial information. It provides feasible solutions towards these and other related issues such as compact data by alternative structures of knowledge representation and avoids the ambiguity of these terms, using a geographic domain conceptualization. The general vision of the paper is to establish the basis to implement semantic processing oriented to geospatial data. Future works are focused on designing intelligent geographic information systems (iGIS).

Advances in Spatial and …, 2009

A lot of information on the web is geographically referenced. Discovering and linking this information poses eminent research challenges to the geospatial semantic web, with regards to the representation and manipulation of geographic data. Towards addressing these challenges, this work explores the potential of the current semantic web languages and tools. In particular, an integrated logical framework of rules and ontologies, using current W3C standards, is assessed for modeling geospatial ontologies of place encoding both symbolic and geometric references to place locations. Spatial reasoning is incorporated in the framework to facilitate the deduction of implicit semantics and for expressing spatial integrity constraints. The logical framework is then extended with geo-computation engines that offer more effective manipulations of geometric information. Example data sets mined from web resources are used to demonstrate and evaluate both frameworks, offering insights to their potentials and limitations.

2000

Information may be defined as the conceptual or communicable part of the content of mental acts. The content of mental acts includes sensory data as well as concepts, particular as well as general information. An information system is an external (non-mental) system designed to store such content. Information systems afford indirect transmission of content between people, some of whom may put information into the system and others who are among those who use the system. In order for communication to happen, the conceptual systems of the originators and users of the information must be sufficiently similar. A formal conceptual framework that can provide the basis for exchange of information is termed an ontology. In its most fundamental form, ontology studies the most basic constituents of reality. Traditionally, ontology seeks to reflects structures that are independent of thought and cognition. The term ontology is used more broadly in artificial intelligence and software engineering, to refer to the conceptual basis for an information system.

Geoinformatica, 2007

Human interactions with geographical information are contextualized by problemsolving activities which endow meaning to geospatial data and processing. However, existing spatial data models have not taken this aspect of semantics into account. This paper extends spatial data semantics to include not only the contents and schemas, but also the contexts of their use. We specify such a semantic model in terms of three related components: context knowledge, contextualized ontology base, and context-sensitive interpretation.