Geo OWL review
The W3C Geospatial Incubator Group published a new Report in October 2007, proposing a simple geospatial ontology for the web.There exist geospatial models, as the ones defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) or the ISO, that provide an accurate geographic representation. But for most applications these models are too complex and costly to implement.
W3C group developed GeoOWL, a minimum geo - vocabulary which follows GeoRSS guidelines. In essence, it just provide a differenciation between what a geographic feature is, and which is its geometry. class and object properties diagram is shown in the next figure. The figure has been obtained with the Protégé Jambalaya plugin.
The simplicity of the model makes it easy to be adopted widespread. But it also has important limitations in order to give more expressivity or functionality. For instance, geographical feature types and topological relationships are expressed with tag like properties.
Some extensions will be proposed in Geospatial Meaning to formalize some geographical relationships (as contains, within…) and feature types (buildings, hidrology, ..).
More information on W3C web:
