ENRICHMENT AND POPULATION OF A GEOSPATIAL ONTOLOGY FOR SEMANTIC INFORMATION EXTRACTION

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The massive amount of user-generated content available today presents a new challenge for the geospatial domain and a great opportunity to delve into linguistic, semantic, and cognitive aspects of geographic information. Ontology-based information extraction is a new, prominent field in which a domain ontology guides the extraction process and the identification of pre-defined concepts, properties, and instances from natural language texts. The paper describes an approach for enriching and populating a geospatial ontology using both a top-down and a bottom-up approach in order to enable semantic information extraction. The top-down approach is applied in order to incorporate knowledge from existing ontologies. The bottom-up approach is applied in order to enrich and populate the geospatial ontology with semantic information (concepts, relations, and instances) extracted from domain-specific web content.</p>

Universal Geospatial Ontology for the Semantic Interoperability of Data

Ontologies have been used to support the interoperability of geospatial data by overcoming semantic problems related to semantic heterogeneities and to differences in data usage contexts. Ideally, to solve semantic heterogeneities, the data models involved in the interoperability process could be enriched, and the relationships between their elements could be defined based on a universal geospatial ontology. However, such ontology would encounter difficulties in achieving an efficient interoperability. This chapter aims to argue that universal ontology-based interoperability remains vulnerable to the risks of uncertain meaning of geospatial data that may go unnoticed during the interoperability process. The chapter discusses these risks and proposes a systematic approach to better support users dealing with them. The proposed approach identifies the risks, assesses their severity, and helps users to make decisions about them.

Geospatial Semantic Web

The Semantic Web technology provides a common interoperable framework in which information is given a well-defined meaning such that data and applications can be used by machines for more effective discovery, automation, integration and reuse. Parallel to the development of the Semantic Web, the Geospatial Semantic Web – a geospatial domain-specific version of the Semantic Web, is initiated recently. Among all the components of the Geospatial Semantic Web, two are especially unique – geospatial ontology and geospatial reasoning. This paper is focused on discussing these two critical issues from representation logic to computational logic.