Object orientation: concepts, languages, databases, user interfaces
Object orientation: concepts, languages, databases, user interfaces
Semantic heterogeneity in distributed geographic databases
ACM SIGMOD Record
Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special issue on linguistic instruments in knowledge engineering (LIKE)
Ontology-driven geographic information systems
Proceedings of the 7th ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems
Simulating multiple inheritance in Java
Journal of Systems and Software
Object-Oriented Software Construction
Object-Oriented Software Construction
What Are Ontologies, and Why Do We Need Them?
IEEE Intelligent Systems
The Formal Structure of Ecological Contexts
CONTEXT '99 Proceedings of the Second International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context
Interoperability in Practice: Problems in Semantic Conversion from Current Technology to OpenGIS
INTEROP '99 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Interoperating Geographic Information Systems
Asessing Semnatic Similarities among Geospatial Feature Class Definitions
INTEROP '99 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Interoperating Geographic Information Systems
ISD '99 Selected Papers from the International Workshop on Integrated Spatial Databases, Digital Inages and GIS
Assessing semantic similarity among spatial entity classes
Assessing semantic similarity among spatial entity classes
Ontology-driven geographic information systems
Ontology-driven geographic information systems
Space and time in eco-ontologies
AI Communications - Special issue on: Spatial and temporal reasoning
Dealing with geospatial information in the semantic web
AOW '05 Proceedings of the 2005 Australasian Ontology Workshop - Volume 58
Space and time in eco-ontologies
AI Communications - Spatial and Temporal Reasoning
A knowledge environment for the biodiversity and ecological sciences
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems
Foundations for an Ontology of Environment and Habitat
Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference (FOIS 2010)
A linguistics-based framework for modeling spatio-temporal occurrences and purposive change
COSIT'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Spatial Information Theory
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Ecology is a subject of great debate today among scientists, governments, and the general public. Issues such as global warming and biodiversity require a mutual agreement among different groups of people. Many times these groups are separated by language, political interests, and culture. Environmental Information Systems need to integrate data from different Geographic Information Systems. This may cause problems resulting from the semantic heterogeneity of the source communities. Before this kind of integration can happen among different groups, the concepts that people have about the real world must be explicitly formalized; such an explicit formalization of our mental models is called an ontology. In this paper we discuss two options for structuring such ontologies. First we discuss the use of hierarchies and roles in the structure of geographic ontologies. Second, we discuss some of the fundamental characteristics of ecological ontologies and draw attention to several formal differences between ecological and geographic ontologies. We conclude by identifying some of the important questions that arise in light of our conception of eco-ontologies.