Geospatial Meaning

Geonames is a free wordwide geographical databse. It’s the most important open geographical gazetter, with a couple of outstanding web services.

The Geonames Ontology v.2.0 was published on 2007-04-02. It is given in two versions, Lite and Full. Full version adds funcionality to provide official and alterante names to geographical features, so just Lite version will be reviewed in this survey.

Jambalaya Protégé plugin has been used to get all the figures.

The review will be divided in three parts:

• Geonames geometric support. Figure 1.
• The Geonames Core ontology, and the feature taxonomy. Figure 1.
• The Geonames Document features. Figure 2.

A diagram of Geonames Core ontology is shown in figure 1. It contains all defined and primitive classes and object properties, excepting those that are related to document features.

The main class is ontology:feature, which represents any geographical entity.

Geonames geometric support

The class ontology:feature is inherited from W3C Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary. So the geometry of the feature is limited in the ontology to a WGS84 point. Perhaps this is the most restricting issue from Geonames ontology, comparing to other existing ones (as GeoOWL, for example).

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