Formal representation of geographic ontology and its application in map services
2008
Geographic ontology is a very complex and intricate concept. As a philosophical concept, ontology has the most
ambiguous meanings. In the paper, firstly the concept of geographic ontology is explored and the three meanings of
geographic ontology are put forward: philosophy ontology, information ontology and spatial ontology. Then it introduces
some ontology representation languages and concludes by suggesting OWL as the appropriate language for building
geographic ontology. But geographic ontology is quite distinct from the general information ontology in that it should
represent spatial properties as well as attribute properties. Unfortunately, OWL cannot describe spatial properties and
spatial relations of geographic ontology because they are mainly for representing the general information ontology. It
puts forward to build some formal axioms about spatial properties of geographic ontology by use of three theoretical
tools: mereology, location theory and topology. With these axioms, we can formally represent geographic ontology with
spatial properties. Finally, it shows how we can use geographic ontology to describe map services and to improve the
quality of map services.
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