OWL-based semantic model for spatio-temporal geographic ontology

Abstract

Semantic models are very important in many applications for describing relationships between concepts or entities. In the geospatial domain, geospatial semantic is the mapping relationship between the description of geospatial data and entities of reality world. The formal description of ontology is fundamental to data exchange standards. Geographical ontology defines the important geographical concepts in the geospatial domain. Ontology semantic modeling is more similar with geographical cognitive modeling. This paper proposed the OWL-based semantic model for spatio-temporal geographic ontology. The semantic model based on the methodology of ontology not only depicts the inner change detail of event and the relationships between events, but also describes the implicit semantic reasoning. Moreover the paper uses the Protégé v3.3.1, which was developed by Stanford Medical Informatics and was based on OWL, to construct the ontology semantic model. And then the subsumption checking and consistency maintenance of the model is reasoned using Racer software and the model is optimized gradually.