Geospatial information integration approach based on geographic context ontologies

Abstract

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. In this work, an approach to geospatial information integration based on the conceptualization of 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 depicts the objects, semantics. Also, this method allows us to compress and share geospatial information by means of alternative structures of knowledge representation. Thus, it avoids the ambiguity of the 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 work is focused on designing intelligent geographic information systems (iGIS). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.