Building Geospatial Ontologies From Geographic Database Schemas In Peer Data Management Systems

One key issue in Peer Data Management Systems (PDMSs) is the heterogeneity of the peer schemas. To help matters, ontologies may be used as uniform conceptual representation of these schemas. In this work, we are working with geographic databases to be used in a PDMS. When dealing with geospatial data, specific problems with representation and usage occur. In this sense, we have developed an approach and a tool, named GeoMap, which builds a peer ontology from a geographic database schema. In order to provide geospatial semantics when mapping, we have defined and used a reference geospatial ontology. We present the principles underlying our approach and examples illustrating how they work by means of the tool.