Building a global normalized ontology for integrating geographic data sources

  • Authors:

  • Agustina Buccella;Alejandra Cechich;Domenico Gendarmi;Filippo Lanubile;Giovanni Semeraro;Attilio Colagrossi

  • Affiliations:

  • GIISCO Research Group, Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Buenos Aires 1400, Neuquen 8300, Argentina;GIISCO Research Group, Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Buenos Aires 1400, Neuquen 8300, Argentina;Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Bari, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Bari, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Bari, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy;ISPRA-Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale, Via Curtatone, 3, 00185 Rome, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Computers & Geosciences
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Nowadays, the proliferation of geographic information systems has caused great interest in integration. However, an integration process is not as simple as joining several systems, since any effort at information sharing runs into the problem of semantic heterogeneity, which requires the identification and representation of all semantics useful in performing schema integration. On several research lines, including research on geographic information system integration, ontologies have been introduced to facilitate knowledge sharing among various agents. Particularly, one of the aspects of ontology sharing is performing some sort of mapping between ontology constructs. Further, some research suggests that we should also be able to combine ontologies where the product of this combination will be, at the very least, the intersection of the two given ontologies. However, few approaches built integrations upon standard and normalized information, which might improve accuracy of mappings and therefore commitment and understandability of the integration. In this work, we propose a novel system (called GeoMergeP) to integrate geographic sources by formalizing their information as normalized ontologies. Our integral merging process-including structural, syntactic and semantic aspects-assists users in finding the more suitable correspondences. The system has been empirically tested in the context of projects of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA, ex APAT), providing a consistent and complete integration of their sources.