Geoconcepts Ontology v1.2 & v1.2_swrl
We have developed a new Geospatial ontology within the CINeSPACE project. The main idea behind this ontology is a more ample model of the spatial dimension. Some concepts, such as country, mountain or building are inherently spatial. But there exists an important number of concepts that are not physically geographic, although they are commonly related to certain areas. Some examples could be human activities as going shopping. Also events and parties or famous personalities are often related to a spatial extent. We have introduced the term “geoconcept” to name any entity with an inherently or indirectly associated spatial dimension. Some characteristics of the ontology are:
- It reuses existing standards, such as GeoOWL and Geonames feature type hierarchy.
- Its expressivity is OWL Lite. Fuzzy logic extensions were planned for spatial relationships, so simplicity is important to guarantee the decidability.
- A rough set of spatial relationships is defined. As the spatial extent of abstract concepts is vague or uncertain, the RCC8 model can’t help with this modeling. Mereologic and neighbourhood properties are defined.
- Spatial common reasoning is strongly related to sight sense. Many times we reference our position with what we see, although we don’t be exactly in that place. This effect is clearly seen in Geotagging processes, when sometimes the position of the photo’s target is provided, but other times the point where the photo was taken is recorded. We call this the source-target problem and we have added a new spatial relationship, hasNiceViewsOf, to model this problem.
- Polygons centroid is added to the geometry part.
- While complete fuzzy reasoners are developed, a simple model is provided to deal with different degrees of uncertainty, adding several fuzzy subproperties to spatial relationships. A set of SWRL rules is optionally added to manage fuzzy transitivity.
An skeleton of the ontology is depicted in the following figure:
Two versions can be used: Geoconcepts Ontology v1.2, and v1.2 SWRL enhanced model.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
[...] Geographic Information Systems conference at Istanbul the 2-5 July, where we were introducing our Geoconcepts architecture. One of the main themes of the conference was Geographic Information Science Education. Robert S. [...]
September 1st, 2008 at 1:54 pm
[...] use both approaches in our spatial model for CINeSPACE [...]
October 6th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
[...] relevant fotr you. This is why Tracasa SA has developed a semantic GIS technology, called Geoconcepts Ontology. “The GeoConcepts ontology provides a way to capture in a GIS system the spatial dimension of [...]
October 7th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Can images be identified or searched for, purely by image content without geographical or directional data?
October 8th, 2008 at 7:52 am
This ontology aims at modeling just the spatial content. However we are working in the classification of abstract concepts, that is Geoconcepts.
To achieve wider search capabilities this ontology is merged with a custom MPEG-7 and other domain specific ontologies within the CINeSPACE project.
What are you looking for?
October 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] The particular challenge presented by the device is the need to allow the user to access a wide variety of geo-referenced information in a small and portable device, and at the same time allow the user to annotate information in an efficient manner. To address these needs a novel semantic GIS technology has been developed at Tracasa SA, called GeoConcepts ontology. [...]