Geo-spatial ontology matching through compact evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

Geo-spatial ontologies can provide a formal description of concepts, relationships, activities, features and rules in GIS domain. However, simply use them only allows to partially solve semantic conflicts, and does not completely solve heterogeneity issues that are caused by themselves. Geo-spatial ontology matching technique can find the correspondences between semantic identical entities, and solve the heterogeneous problem between two geo-spatial ontologies. Be inspired by the successful application of Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) in instance matching domain, in this paper, it is utilized to match the heterogeneous geo-spatial ontologies. To reduce the runtime and memory consumption required by EA, a compact version of it is presented, which does not work on the whole population but a probability representation on it. In addition, a geo-spatial similarity measure is presented to determine the identical geo-spatial entities, and an optimal model is constructed for geo-spatial ontology matching problem. The experimental results show that cEA-based geo-spatial ontology matching technique can efficiently determine the alignment.