Abstract
Integration of geographic information has increased in importance
because of new possibilities arising from the interconnected world
and the increasing availability of geographic information. Ontologies
support the creation of conceptual models and help with information
integration. In this paper, we propose a way to link the formal representation
of semantics (i.e., ontologies) to conceptual schemas describing
information stored in databases. The main result is a formal framework
that explains a mapping between a spatial ontology and a geographic
conceptual schema. The mapping of ontologies to conceptual schemas
is made using three different levels of abstraction: formal, domain,
and application levels. At the formal level, highly abstract concepts
are used to express the schema and the ontologies. At the domain
level, the schema is regarded as an instance of a generic data model.
At the application level, we focus on the particular case of geographic
applications. We also discuss the influence of ontologies in both
the traditional and geographic systems development methodologies,
with an emphasis on the conceptual design phase.
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