Semantically-Aware Systems: Extraction of Geosemantics, Ontology Engineering, and Ontology Integration

Abstract

Geographic hypermedia systems include geospatial information from diverse sources. Meaningful access and utilization of such information is materialized only with semantic integration and proper documentation through ontologies. The present work presents a unified view of important research subdomains tasks related to geosemantics and ontologies, (as formal representations of geographic knowledge), such as ontology engineering, extraction of semantic information and ontology integration. Although there is a great degree of recent literature in the field, differences in (a) perspective — purpose, (b) the primary information available and (c) the methodologies and tools used, compose unrelated approaches that have not been put in the overall context. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for the wider audience to understand the difference and the applicability of available approaches in a given context. An attempt is made to draw the overall picture in order to assist users in defining their problem, selecting an appropriate approach and successfully undertaking a geosemantics or ontology-based task.