Generating the framework of the Fundamental Geographic Information ontology in China by using a formal ontological approach
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Li, L.; 2Kuai, X.; 3Luo, H.; 4Jin, Y.; 5Wang, X.
1WUHAN UNIVERSITY Email: lilin@whu.edu.cn
2WUHAN UNVERSITY Email: kuaixi611011@foxmail.com
3WUHAN UNIVERSITY Email: luoheng@whu.edu.cn
4HAINAN ADMINISTRATION OF SURVEYING,MAPPING,GEOINFORMATION
5HAINAN ADMINISTRATION OF SURVEYING,MAPPING,GEOINFORMATION
Abstract
Ontology is regarded as an effective means to overcome semantic barrier and access to the domain knowledge.For achieving semantic inter-operability in the Geographic domain, this paper proposes to apply formal ontological technologies to the development of the Chinese fundamental geographic information ontology. A major part of this work involves the construction of the operational framework of concepts and attributes in the geographic domain. Firstly, we use the domain-specification approach to explicit the concepts and relations for the fundamental geographic information ranging from natural language to rigorously formal specification, in which the meta-level categories, about 740 hierarchically structured geographic concepts and their relationships are indicated. Then the formal semantics of each geographic concept is explicitly specified by asset of the defined ontological properties over its attributes, in which the spatial-temporal properties, functionality, measurement and other special attributes are included. Finally, we show the future direction for exploration about how to integrate our fundamental geographic information ontology as a core spatial-temporal knowledge base for the development of other domain-ontology in China.