Expression and application of geospatial relation ontology

Abstract

Spatial relation is one of the most important features of geographic space information. The in-depth research on spatial relation is the base of realizing GIS spatial reasoning. Recently GIS software could only express few spatial relations and is difficult to be understood by computer, and also the researches on spatial relation ignore commonsense spatial cognition of people. The process on spatial relation reasoning causes serious semantic collision. Ontology theory was introduced to research spatial relation, which accorded with the commonsense spatial cognition of people. The paper designed a whole frame of space ontology and geospatial relation ontology model, which realized the expression of that model with TBC software. The paper built geographical ontology instance base based on Region data of Henan province and realized the expression of spatial relation ontology with OWL language. Some application instances were also done to validate the theories and technologies of the paper. The final aim is to promote the share and reuse of spatial relation knowledge.