Geographic Knowledge Representation Using Conceptual Graphs

Geographic concept definitions are a rich source of knowledge with special structure and content. Conceptual Graphs are a visual, advanced knowledge based representation formalism grounded on philosophical, linguistic and object-oriented principles (Sowa, 1984 & 2000). We introduce a straightforward and easy-to-implement methodology for the representation of geographic knowledge, expressed by definitions, using conceptual graphs. The proposed methodology consists of two steps: tagging and parsing. In the first step, we follow appropriate rules to tag every word in the concept definition expressing specific geographic knowledge. In the second step, we apply a deterministic algorithm in order to parse the tagged definition and create the corresponding conceptual graph. Hence, we take advantage of conceptual graphs’ potentials to represent semantic information extracted from definitions of geographic concepts and explicate their semantics.