Building a global normalized ontology for integrating geographic data sources

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. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Tutti gli autori

  • LANUBILE F.;SEMERARO G.

Titolo volume/Rivista

Non Disponibile


Anno di pubblicazione

2011

ISSN

0098-3004

ISBN

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Numero di citazioni Wos

12

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

Non Disponibile


Numero di citazioni Scopus

24

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Settori ERC

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Codici ASJC

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