Semantic Analyses of the Fundamental Geographic Information Based on Formal Ontology——Exemplifying Hydrological Category
LI Deren · Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica · 2008
Semantic sharing is the key issue to interoperability in the community of geographic information.By exemplifying inland hydrological categorization in the domain of the fundamental geographic information in China,a discussion is made on the ambiguous semantics of the normative definitions of categories in some specifications.Ontology is regarded as an effective means to overcome semantic barrier in the domain of geographic information.A paradigm of formal semantic analyses of geographic information is put forward in this paper,in terms of the formal ontology.With conceptualization of a category,attributes of a category are used for expressing its semantics.By examining the given hydrological categories,the formal semantics of each geographic concept is explicitly specified by a set of the defined ontological properties over its attributes.