World Geographical Ontology Model

Abstract

Recent days have witnessed an explosive growth in generating data in geographic domain which leads to increasing the applications of geographical information system (GIS). Due to this increasing of GIS, GIS faced the problem of effective management of the spatial information from different resources and in different forms. So, Geographical ontologies have been introduced to the geographical domain not only as a concept model which can represent objects on semantic and knowledge level, but also to integrate geographical data from different sources and in different forms for reasoning and to facilitate knowledge sharing, in addition to assist in recognizing spatial terms.In this research, the World geographical ontology model has been developed to meet the needs of the recognition of the terminologies and the semantic relationships between geographical terms related to any location in the world. It will enable search engine to perform a spatially aware search. The design of World ontology model has been developed based on the analysis and finding relations between different parts of World locations to adopt ontology concepts. Logical formulation has been used to describe the ontology to be able to infer more intelligent relations. Then the model has been implemented using protégé tool, a sample of related data has been collected and finally the system has been tested. Query answers integrate data from different sources.