Ontology for the engineering of geospatial systems

Abstract

In this paper, a metamodel ontology is introduced to describe a domain of data components for geospatial data and query systems. The ontology satisfies the need to model the more complex environment that occurs within a geospatial system. For example, contrary to typical databases, geospatial data have additional metadata files describing the actual data. Also, a geospatial system may have domain ontologies in addition to semantic mappings. Currently, user knowledge is required to know the relationships between all data components (data, metadata, ontologies, mappings, etc.). Contrary to that, we propose a system ontology over which automatic inferencing can be done to determine relationships and meanings among data components. This work fits into the vision of the Semantic Web and interlinked data and knowledge networks and applies these notions to a metamodel for a data system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.