Abstract
We concentrate on geospatial ontologies. Our main contribution in this paper is a methodology and a minimal set of guiding principles, inspired by the faceted approach, as originally developed in library science, and a large-scale ontology for Space that we have constructed following the methodology proposed. The approach we propose, centered on the fundamental notions of domain and facet, guarantees the creation of high-quality ontologies in terms of robustness, extensibility, reusability, compactness and flexibility. Taking into account the different aspects of Space, the ontology we have developed, and that we have obtained from the refinement and extension of some existing resources including GeoNames, WordNet and the Italian part of MultiWordNet, provides knowledge about places of the world, their classes, their attributes and the spatial relations between them. The construction procedure was manual for the identification and categorization into facets of the terms denoting classes, relations and attribute names, while it was automatic for the population of the ontology with entities and corresponding attribute values. This has allowed us to obtain a very satisfactory quantitative and qualitative result.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Abdelmoty AI, Smart P, Jones CB (2007) Building place ontologies for the semantic web: issues and approaches. In: 4th ACM workshop on GIR
Angioni M, Demontis R, Tuveri F (2006) Enriching WordNet to index and retrieve semantic information. In: 2nd international conference on metadata and semantics research
Arpinar IB, Sheth A, Ramakrishnan C (2004) Geospatial ontology development and semantic analytics. In: Wilson JP, Fotheringham AS (eds) Handbook of geographic information science. Blackwell
Auer S, Lehmann J, Hellman S (2009) LinkedGeoData—adding a spatial dimension to the Web of data. In: 8th international semantic web conference (ISWC)
Baader F, Calvanese D, McGuinness D, Nardi D, Patel-Schneider PF (2002) The description logic handbook: theory, implementation and applications. Cambridge University Press
Battacharyya G (1975) POPSI: its fundamentals and procedure based on a general theory of subject indexing languages. Library Sci Slant Document 16(1):1–34
Broughton V (2006) The need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval. Aslib 58(1/2):49–72
Buscardi D, Rosso P (2008) Geo-wordnet: automatic georeferencing of wordnet. In: 5th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC)
Chaves MS, Silva MJ, Martins B (2005) A geographic knowledge base for semantic web applications. In: 20th Brazilian symposium on databases (SBBD)
Dutta B, Giunchiglia F, Maltese V (2011) A facet-based methodology for geospatial modeling. In: 4th international conference on geospatial semantics (GEOS), vol 6631, pp 133–150
Egenhofer M, Herring J (1991) Categorization binary topological relationships between regions, lines, and points in geographic databases. In: Egenhofer M, Herring J (eds) A framework for the definition of topological relationships and an approach to spatial reasoning within this framework. Santa Barbara, CA
Egenhofer MJ (2002) Toward the semantic GeoSpatial Web. In: 10th ACM international symposium on advances in geographic information systems (ACM-GIS), pp 1–4
Egenhofer MJ, Dupe MP (2009) Topological relations from metric refinements. In: 17th ACM international conference on advances in geographic information systems (SIGSPATIAL GIS)
Farazi F, Maltese V, Giunchiglia F, Ivanyukovich A (2010) A faceted ontology for a semantic geo-catalogue. In: 8th Extended semantic web conference (ESWC)
Giunchiglia F, Walsh T (1989) Abstract theorem proving. In: 11th international joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), pp 372–377
Giunchiglia F, Villafiorita A, Walsh T (1997) Theories of abstraction.. AI Commun 10(3/4): 167–176
Giunchiglia F, Shvaiko P, Yatskevich M (2006) Discovering missing background knowledge in ontology matching. In: 17th European conference on artificial intelligence (ECAI)
Giunchiglia F, Zaihrayeu I (2008) Lightweight ontologies. In: LNCS encyclopedia of database systems
Giunchiglia F, Dutta B, Maltese V (2009) Faceted lightweight ontologies. In: Borgida A, Chaudhri V, Giorgini P, Yu E (eds) Conceptual modeling: foundations and applications. LNCS, vol 5600.. Springer, New York
Giunchiglia F, Maltese V, Farazi F, Dutta B (2010) GeoWordNet: a resource for geospatial applications. Extended semantic web conference (ESWC)
Giunchiglia F, Autayeu A, Pane J (2012) S-Match: an open source framework for matching lightweight ontologies. Semantic Web J (to appear)
Giunchiglia F, Maltese V, Dutta B (2012) Domains and context: first steps towards managing diversity in knowledge. J Web Semantics (special issue on Reasoning with Context in the Semantic Web). doi:10.1016/j.websem.2011.11.007
Janowicz K, Schade S, Bröring A, Keßler C, Stasch C, Maue’ P, Diekhof Y (2009) A transparent semantic enablement layer for the geospatial web. Terra Cognita Workshop
Jones CB, Adbelmoty AI, Fu G (2003) Maintaining ontologies for geographical information retrieval on the Web. On the move to meaningful internet systems 2003: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keßler C, Janowicz K, Bishr M (2009) An agenda for the next generation gazetteer: geographic information contribution and retrieval. In: 17th ACM international conference on advances in geographic information systems (SIGSPATIAL GIS)
Kolas D, Dean M, Hebeler J (2005) Geospatial semantic web: architecture of ontologies. First Int Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics (GEOS), pp 183–194
Kuhn W (2005) Geospatial semantics: why, of what, and how. J Data Semant 3: 1–24
Mark D, Turk A, Stea D (2007) Progress on Yindjibarndi ethnophysiography. In: 8th International COSIT conference, pp 1–19
Miller GA, Hristea F (2006) WordNet nouns: classes and instances. Comput Linguist 32(1):1–3
Pullar D, Egenhofer MJ (1998) Toward formal definitions of topological relations among spatial objects. In: 3rd international symposium on spatial data handling, pp 165–176
Ranganathan SR (1965) The colon classification. In: Artandi S (ed) The Rutgers series on systems for the intellectual organization of information, IV. Graduate School of Library Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Ranganathan SR(1967) Prolegomena to library classification. Asia Publishing House
Ranganathan SR (1987) Colon classification, 7th edn. SRELS, Bangalore
Roman D, Klien E, Skogan D(2006) SWING—asemantic web service framework for the geospatial domain.TerraCognitaWorkshop
Shvaiko P, Ivanyukovich A, Vaccari L, Maltese V, Farazi F (2010) Asemantic geo-catalogue implementation for a regional SDI. INPSIRE conference
Smith B (1995) On drawing lines on a map. In: Frank AU, Kuhn W (eds) Spatial information theory. a theoretical basis for GIS LNCS, vol 988, pp 475–484
Smith B, Mark DM (1998) Ontology and geographic kinds. International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling
Spiteri L (1998) Asimplified model for facet analysis. J Inf Library Sci 23:1–30
Suchanek FM, Kasneci G, Weikum G (2007) YAGO: a core of semantic knowledge unifying WordNet and Wikipedia. In: 16th WWW conference, pp 697–706
UDC Consortium (2005) UDC—universal decimal classification. Standard edition, 2 vols. BSI, London
Vorz R, Kleb J, Mueller W (2007) Towards ontology-based disambiguation of geographical identifiers. In: Proceedings of the 16th WWW conference (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This paper is a substantially revised and extended version of two papers. The first was entitled “GeoWordNet: a resource for geospatial applications” and was presented at the ESWC 2010 conference [20]; the second was entitled “A facet-based methodology for geospatial modeling” and was presented at the GEOS 2011 conference [10]. The ontology presented in this paper is an extension of GeoWordNet, a semantic and linguistic resource distributed as open source that can be freely downloaded from http://geowordnet.semanticmatching.org/.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Giunchiglia, F., Dutta, B., Maltese, V. et al. A Facet-Based Methodology for the Construction of a Large-Scale Geospatial Ontology. J Data Semant 1, 57–73 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-012-0005-x
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-012-0005-x