Abstract

In this report we survey the current state of the art on research and practice in geospatial ontology. After motivating the need for geospatial ontologies, we describe a range of what one can mean by the term “ontology”—a standard vocabulary, a hierarchy of terms, or a full theory in first-order logic. In the survey we look at examples of all three, but we urge greater formalization as a path to more reliable interoperability. We then describe the coverage we believe a widely-used geospatial ontology would have to have. It should include the possibility of rich descriptions of the topology of complex regions and three-dimensional structures. It should include a way of talking about direction, multiple frames of reference, shape, and size. It should have access to large compendia of natural, man-made, and geopolitical entities. One should be able to view geospatial fields and objects at different granularities. It should be possible to combine it with ontologies of time and of events and processes to produce ontologies of motion and change of varying complexity.
We examine the state of the art in spatial representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence, particularly with respect to qualitative topological information, hybrid qualitativequantitative representations, directions, and combining space and time. We then survey representative examples of several categories of geospatial resource, looking at their implicit or explicit ontology. The types of resource include geospatial datasets, such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names; geographic information systems, such as ArcGIS; geospatial ontology standards, such as the OpenGIS Feature Geometry; and …

Date

2006

Authors

Jerry Hobbs, James Blythe, Hans Chalupsky, Thomas A Russ

Journal

Public Distribution of the University of Southern California