Formalizing mappings for OWL spatiotemporal ontologies

Abstract

Ontology mappings provide a common layer which allows distributed applications to share and to exchange semantic information. Providing mechanized ways for mapping ontologies is a challenging issue and main problems to be faced are related to structural and semantic heterogeneity. The complexity of these problems increases in the presence of spatiotemporal information such as geometry and topological intrinsic characteristics. Our proposal is intended for spatiotemporal ontologies and focuses on providing an integrated access to information sources using local ontologies. Our approach is set to build a system that guides users to derive meaningful mappings and to reason about them. To achieve this we use a description logic extended to spatiotemporal concrete domain. The ontology of each source is normalized in a common extended Ontology Web Language (OWL) which enables a natural correspondence with the spatiotemporal description logic formalism. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.