Obtaining semantic descriptions based on conceptual schemas embedded into a geographic context

Abstract

Information integration and semantic heterogeneity are not trivial tasks. An integrated view must be able to describe various heterogeneous data sources and its interrelation to obtain shared conceptualizations. In this paper, we propose an approach to make a conceptualization of the real world based on conceptual schemas, which are used to generate a semantic description of the geospatial domain. This description attempts to provide the guidelines to formalize the geographic domain in form of geospatial ontologies according to specific contexts. We propose conceptual schemas in order to abstract specific and essential parts of the geospatial domain and to represent schematically which geospatial entities should be collected and how they must be organized. Moreover, we perceive that geographic data modeling requires models more specific and capable of capturing the semantics of geospatial data, offering higher abstraction mechanisms and implementation independence. Therefore, we approach conceptual schemas to describe the contents of the real world abstraction to specify the behavior of the geospatial entities, in which the context plays an important role to guarantee shared and explicit conceptualizations. Our research is mainly oriented to propose an approach related to conceptual issues concerning what would be required to establish ontologies of the geospatial domain. In addition, the work is led to formalize appropriate methods basing on conceptual schemas to represent ontologies of the geospatial domain.