Abstract:
Effective integration and wide sharing of geospatial data is an important and basic premise to facilitate the research and applications of geographic information science. However, the semantic heterogeneity of geospatial data is a major problem that significantly hinders geospatial data integration and sharing. Ontologies are regarded as a promising way to solve semantic problems by providing a formalized representation of geographic entities and relationships between them in a manner understandable to machines. Thus, many efforts have been made to explore ontology-based geospatial data integration and sharing. However, there is a lack of a specialized ontology that could provide a unified description for geospatial data. In this lecture, with a focus on the characteristics of geospatial data, I will introduce a unified framework for geospatial data ontology, denoted GeoDataOnt, which can help establish a semantic foundation for geospatial data integration and sharing. First, I will provide a characteristics hierarchy of geospatial data, and analyze the semantic problems for each characteristic of geospatial data. Then, the general framework of GeoDataOnt will be presented, targeting those problems according to the characteristics of geospatial data, and the building and implementation of GeoDataOnt in a modular way will be showed. Finally, this lecture will end with the broad applications of GeoDataOnt, and its key limitations and challenges.
Comment list ( 0 )
