TY - JOUR
T1 - Framework for measuring the interoperability of geo-ontologies
AU - Fonseca, Frederico
AU - Câmara, Gilberto
AU - Monteiro, Antonio Miguel
N1 - Funding Information:
Frederico Fonseca’s work is supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF ITR grant number 0219025, by a fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, and by funds from Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. Gilberto Câmara’s work is partially funded by CNPq (grants PQ 300557/19996-5 and 550250/2005-0) and FAPESP (grant 04/11012-0). We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped the improvement of the final version of this paper.
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Interoperability is a crucial problem for geographic information systems. The transfer of data and models between different systems requires the ability to set up a correspondence between concepts in one system to concepts in the other. Concept matching is helped by ontologies. However, the challenge of making ontologies themselves interoperable continues. In other words, given two geo-ontologies, the basic question is: to which degree are these two geo-ontologies interoperable? In this paper, we consider that a geo-ontology describes things that can be assigned to locations on the surface of the Earth and relations between these things. A geo-ontology has concepts that correspond to physical and social phenomena in the real world. We suggest a classification of these concepts based on their use for describing geo-objects. We present a basic set of concepts for a geographical ontology, based on descriptions of the physical world and of the social reality. We also present a framework for measuring the degree of interoperability between geo-ontologies. We consider that this problem is a special case of Bernstein's model management algebra for metadata descriptions. We propose to use a matching operator for measuring interoperability between ontologies. The proposed framework provides a first basis for computational tools that allow a more precise response to problem of ontology interoperability.
AB - Interoperability is a crucial problem for geographic information systems. The transfer of data and models between different systems requires the ability to set up a correspondence between concepts in one system to concepts in the other. Concept matching is helped by ontologies. However, the challenge of making ontologies themselves interoperable continues. In other words, given two geo-ontologies, the basic question is: to which degree are these two geo-ontologies interoperable? In this paper, we consider that a geo-ontology describes things that can be assigned to locations on the surface of the Earth and relations between these things. A geo-ontology has concepts that correspond to physical and social phenomena in the real world. We suggest a classification of these concepts based on their use for describing geo-objects. We present a basic set of concepts for a geographical ontology, based on descriptions of the physical world and of the social reality. We also present a framework for measuring the degree of interoperability between geo-ontologies. We consider that this problem is a special case of Bernstein's model management algebra for metadata descriptions. We propose to use a matching operator for measuring interoperability between ontologies. The proposed framework provides a first basis for computational tools that allow a more precise response to problem of ontology interoperability.
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U2 - 10.1207/s15427633scc0604_2
DO - 10.1207/s15427633scc0604_2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84875980733
SN - 1387-5868
VL - 6
SP - 309
EP - 331
JO - Spatial Cognition and Computation
JF - Spatial Cognition and Computation
IS - 4
ER -