Incorporating Update Semantics Within Geographical Ontologies

Abstract

In this paper is described a systematic technique by which geographical ontologies, descriptions of concepts and relationships that exist for geographical domains of interest, may incorporate update policies, knowledge that governs the updating of data described by these ontologies. Of particular interest are those ontologies describing distributed geographical data where different components are maintained by separate organizations. As provider organizations change their individual contributions to the distributed data set, the efficacy of a local copy of this distributed data will decline. The incorporated update policy of the associated ontology for this local copy will be used to determine when an accumulation of changes, described by update notifications, justifies updating the local copy. Update policies and update notifications are assumed to have a common ontological basis. Ontologies are described using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) [4] with the semantics of an update policy being expressed using a UML profile described in this paper. The intent is to implement software agents that will execute the update policy and when justified will generate a plan by which the local copy can be updated to reflect the distributed data currently available.