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Automatic Expansion of Spatial Ontologies for Geographic Information Retrieval

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Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems. Theory and Foundations (IPMU 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 854))

Abstract

One of the most prominent scenarios for capturing implicit knowledge from heterogeneous data sources concerns the geospatial data domain. In this scenario, ontologies play a key role for managing the totality of geospatial concepts, categories and relations at different resolutions. However, the manual development of geographic ontologies implies an exhausting work due to the rapid growth of the data available on the Internet. In order to address this challenge, the present work describes a semi-automatic approach to build and expand a geographic ontology by integrating the information provided by diverse spatial data sources. The generated ontology can be used as a knowledge resource in a Geographic Information Retrieval system. As a main novelty, the use of OWL 2 as an ontology language allowed us to model and infer new spatial relationships, regarding the use of other less expressive languages such as RDF or OWL 1. Two different spatial ontologies were generated for two specific geographic regions by applying the proposed approach, and the evaluation results showed their suitability to be used as geographic-knowledge resources in Geographic Information Retrieval contexts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    MBR is an expression of the maximum extents of a 2-dimensional object (e.g. point, line, polygon). MBRs are frequently used as an indication of the general position of a geographic feature.

  2. 2.

    http://geoknow.eu.

  3. 3.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts.

  4. 4.

    http://www.w3.org/OWL.

  5. 5.

    http://linkedgeodata.org.

  6. 6.

    http://www.geonames.org. GeoNames is an open access geographic database that contains more than eight million place names from all countries in the world.

  7. 7.

    http://wordnet.princeton.edu.

  8. 8.

    http://www.openstreetmap.org. OSM is a collaborative project inspired by Wikipedia that emerged to create an editable and free world map where, instead of editing articles as in Wikipedia, users edit geographic entities.

  9. 9.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview.

  10. 10.

    http://protege.stanford.edu.

  11. 11.

    http://www.geonames.org/ontology/ontology_v3.1.rdf.

  12. 12.

    http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wkt-crs.

  13. 13.

    http://jaryard.com/projects/osm4j/.

  14. 14.

    http://github.com/Esri/geometry-api-java.

  15. 15.

    http://population.city/cuba/marianao.

  16. 16.

    http://population.city/mexico/acapulco-de-juarez.

  17. 17.

    http://www.iderc.cu.

  18. 18.

    http://www.iderc.cu/geoserver/web.

  19. 19.

    OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!). http://oops.linkeddata.es.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by FEDER and the State Research Agency (AEI) of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competition under grant MERINET: TIN2016-76843-C4-2-R (AEI/FEDER, UE).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, La Habana, Cuba

    Manuel E. Puebla-Martínez

  2. Universidad de Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain

    José M. Perea-Ortega

  3. Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana José Antonio Echeverría, La Habana, Cuba

    Alfredo Simón-Cuevas

  4. Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Francisco P. Romero

Authors
  1. Manuel E. Puebla-Martínez
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  2. José M. Perea-Ortega
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  3. Alfredo Simón-Cuevas
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  4. Francisco P. Romero
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to José M. Perea-Ortega .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Cádiz, Cádiz, Cadiz, Spain

    Jesús Medina

  2. Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Manuel Ojeda-Aciego

  3. Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

    José Luis Verdegay

  4. Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

    David A. Pelta

  5. Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Inma P. Cabrera

  6. LIP6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, CNRS, Paris, France

    Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier

  7. Iona College, New Rochelle, New York, USA

    Ronald R. Yager

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Puebla-Martínez, M.E., Perea-Ortega, J.M., Simón-Cuevas, A., Romero, F.P. (2018). Automatic Expansion of Spatial Ontologies for Geographic Information Retrieval. In: Medina, J., et al. Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems. Theory and Foundations. IPMU 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 854. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91476-3_54

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91476-3_54

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