Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Ontology is fundament for development of web of data; e.g. Semantic
Web. Semantic web allows development of higher interoperability of
geographical information, and the goal of the Semantic Web is to improve
interoperability by developing systems that can support trusted interactions
over the network. It can be seen as system that allow interoperability
between different resources that are defined trough the same ontological
model and semantic web.
4- Web ontology language (OWL)
There are more different languages for representation and modeling
ontologies (Jones et al. 2003). Each of them should be compatible with
existing web standards (as XML, RDF) to facilitate sharing of information
with other searching components. It should have adequate possibility to
express ontology representation and to easily extend it. Some of these
languages are based on XML (XOL, SHOE, RDF), some on descriptive
logic (KIF, CLASSIC) and other on both (OIL, DAML+OIL, OWL). The
last group languages are mostly used because they are compatible with
existing web standards.
The Semantic Web introduced the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to
formalize the description of ontology on the Web in a format that
machines and applications can read. OWL is W3C semantic markup language
for publishing and sharing ontologies over web. It is developed to define
ontologies and improve interoperability between them. OWL is more and
more used to define consistent geographic information ontologies.
5- Building place names conceptual domain ontologies
Ontology is a conceptual model that defines concepts of a universe of dis-
course, and feature is abstraction of real world phenomena that define a
universe of discourse. Because of that, ontology is usually using features
(concepts) as object in domain ontology connecting them with relation-
