A Facet-Based Methodology for the Construction of a Large-Scale Geospatial Ontology

Abstract

We concentrate on geospatial ontologies. Our main contribution in this paper is a methodology and a minimal set of guiding principles, inspired by the faceted approach, as originally developed in library science, and a large-scale ontology for Space that we have constructed following the methodology proposed. The approach we propose, centered on the fundamental notions of domain and facet, guarantees the creation of high-quality ontologies in terms of robustness, extensibility, reusability, compactness and flexibility. Taking into account the different aspects of Space, the ontology we have developed, and that we have obtained from the refinement and extension of some existing resources including GeoNames, WordNet and the Italian part of MultiWordNet, provides knowledge about places of the world, their classes, their attributes and the spatial relations between them. The construction procedure was manual for the identification and categorization into facets of the terms denoting classes, relations and attribute names, while it was automatic for the population of the ontology with entities and corresponding attribute values. This has allowed us to obtain a very satisfactory quantitative and qualitative result.