Using Ontologies for Integrated Geographic Information Systems

By F. Fonseca, Max J. Egenhofer, P. Agouris, G. Câmara. Trans. GIS, 2002

552 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Today, there is a huge amount of data gathered about the Earth, not only from new spatial information systems, but also from new and more sophisticated data collection technologies. This scenario leads to a number of interesting research challenges, such as how to integrate geographic information of different kinds. The basic motivation of this paper is to introduce a GIS architecture that can enable geographic information integration in a seamless and flexible way based on its semantic value and regardless of its representation. The proposed solution is an ontology‐driven geographic information system that acts as a system integrator. In this system, an ontology is a component, such as the database, cooperating to fulfill the system’s objectives. By browsing through ontologies the users can be provided with information about the embedded knowledge of the system. Special emphasis is given to the case of remote sensing systems and geographic information systems. The levels of ontologies can be used to guide processes for the extraction of more general or more detailed information. The use of multiple ontologies allows the extraction of information in different stages of classification. The semantic integration of aerial images and GIS is a crucial step towards better geospatial modeling.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Geography, Planning and Development, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e018f35c7b71a764a4ca8bcdc04a4d15518751fb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Shaowen Wang
2. Pragya Agarwal
3. Max J. Egenhofer
4. Germain Forestier

In Geography, Planning and Development

1. Pragya Agarwal
2. Shaowen Wang
3. Max J. Egenhofer
4. Michael F. Worboys

In Signal Processing

1. Pragya Agarwal
2. Shaowen Wang
3. Max J. Egenhofer
4. Germain Forestier
5. Michael F. Worboys

Citations in the corpus

• Toward the semantic geospatial web (2002, methodology): “a similar way, one needs to develop methods that describe the semantics of geospatial feature classes and geospatial labels [7, 13].”
• Coastal image interpretation using background knowledge and semantics (2013, methodology): “The use of ontologies to represent the semantics of geoscience domain knowledge was introduced by [15] who proposed a GIS architecture that enables geographic information integration in a flexible way based on its semantic value and regardless of its representation.”
• A CyberGIS Framework for the Synthesis of Cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and Spatial Analysis (2010, background): “…(S. Wang et al. 2005; Zhang et al. 2006; S. Wang and Liu 2009), coupling of GIS and modeling (Kwan 2001; Wright et al. 2003), ontology-driven GIS (Fonseca et al. 2002), and semantic geospatial Web (Egenhofer 2002), have demonstrated in part the benefits, challenges, and possibilities of CyberGIS…”
• Ontological considerations in GIScience (2005, methodology): “Ontology has been discussed in GIScience as a standardization procedure through which easier translation between different information sources can be achieved (Chandrasekaran et al. 1999, Smith 1999, Fonseca et al. 2002).”