Copyright © 2005 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.
A critical evaluation of ontology languages for geographic information retrieval on the Internet
Received 15 April 2004;
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Abstract
A geo-ontology has a key role to play in the development of a spatially aware search engine, with regard to providing support for query disambiguation, query term expansion, relevance ranking and web resource annotation. This paper reviews those functions and identifies the challenges arising in the construction and maintenance of such an ontology. Two current contenders for the representation of the geo-ontology are GML, a specific markup language for geographic domains and OWL, a generic ontology representation language. Both languages are used to model the geo-ontology designed for supporting web retrieval of geographic concepts. The powers and limitations of the languages are identified. In particular, the paper highlights the lack of representation and reasoning abilities for different types of rules needed for supporting the geo-ontology.
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Architecture of the SPIRIT search engine
- 3. A geographical ontology for SPIRIT
- 4. Requirements for a geo-ontology representation language
- 4.1. Basic requirements
- 4.2. Desirable requirements
- 5. The geo-ontology in GML
- 6. The geo-ontology in OWL
- 6.1. Handling basic requirements
- 6.1.1. Classes and properties
- 6.1.2. Data properties
- 6.1.3. Object properties
- 6.2. Handling desirable requirements
- 7. A comparative evaluation of the languages
- 7.1. Representational issues
- 7.2. Reasoning power
- 7.3. On querying the ontologies
- 7.4. On scalability issues
- 8. Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- References







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