Qualitative Linguistic Terms and Geographic Concepts: Quantifiers in Definitions

Definitions of categories in existent geospatial ontologies are an invaluable source of information because they provide us with essential knowledge about concepts and their properties. A closer examination reveals that definitions also contain supplementary linguistic items, which are mainly qualitative expressions, such as quantifiers. This inclusion of modifiers in definitions affects the way values are assigned to the categories’ properties (semantic properties and relations). This paper introduces a methodology for a) representing the essence of qualitative information to clarify the identity relations among categories, and b) assessing their semantic similarity in order to disambiguate the taxonomic structure of existent geospatial ontologies.