Geo‐ontology Tools: The Missing Link

Abstract

Numerous authors have presented ontology building tools that have all been developed as part of academic projects and that are usually adaptations of more generic tools for geo‐spatial applications. While we trust that these tools do their job for the special purpose they have been built, the GIScience user community is still a long way away from off‐the‐shelf ontology builders that can be used by GIS project managers. In this article, we present a comparative study of ontology building tools described in some twenty peer‐reviewed GIScience journal articles. We analyze them from the perspective of two application domains, crime analysis and transportation/land use. For the latter, we developed a database schema, which is substantially different from the three main templates commonly used. The crime analysis application uses a rule base for an agent‐based model that had no precursor. In both cases, the currently available set of tools cannot replace manual coding of ontologies for use with ESRI‐based application software. Based on these experiences, we outline a requirements list of what the tools described in the first part of the article are missing to make them practical from an applications perspective. The result is an R&D agenda for this important aspect of GIScience.

Sensors Tell More than They Sense: Modeling and Reasoning about Sensor Observations for Understanding Weather Events

“…The Sensor Web lacks an ontology of geographic events that are both formally described and at the same time well enough designed to reach the sensor-based applications [16]. We argue that the essential part of the solution for this challenge is to: (a) Formalize the relations between geographic events and observed properties.…”

“…Using a sensor simulator 16 ( Figure 6), we simulate the historical hourly observations of several days for the Brandon Airport, Manitoba station (WMO Id: 71140). 17 The WMO ID is an international identifier assigned by the Environment Canada to standards of the World Meteorological Organization for weather stations.…”

Ontologies in Urban Development Projects

“…Beside general research issues such as the evaluation of ontologies quality (Guarino and Welty 2004), there are some specific research challenges for the GI community (Albrecht et al 2008;Bucella et al 2009). …”

“…It appears that we are short of ontologies of geographic processes and ontologies are much easier translated into a database schema than into process model. A practical ontology of process that is both proven to be formally correct and at the same time well enough developed to reach to the level of real world applications is still missing (Albrecht et al 2008). Additionally, a huge work has still to be done to cover concepts such as spatial relations, vagueness or geoobject's changes.…”

“…For example, Albrecht et al (2008) raise the issue that moving from static GIS repositories to GIS-based process modelling systems requires the development of reusable libraries of process specifications. They also identify a rather important technical drawback which is that current ontology editors are far from allowing a straightforward connection to GIS; there is usually a long way towards linking original geospatial ontology development with the creation of professional GIS database schemata.…”