Exploring Visualization of Geospatial Ontologies using Cesium

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the usage of geospatial data, not only by the scientific community but also by the general public. Considering the diverse and heterogeneous nature of geospatial applications around the world and their inter-dependence, there is an impending need for enabling sharing of semantics of such content-rich geospatial information. Geospatial ontologies form the building blocks for sharing of semantics of this information, thus ensuring interoperability. Visualization of geospatial ontologies from a spatio-temporal perspective can greatly benefit the process of knowledge engineering in the geospatial domain. This paper proposes to visually explore and reason over the instances of a geospatial ontology – the geopolitical ontology developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations using Cesium – a WebGL based virtual globe. It advocates the usage of Cesium for visualization of geospatial ontologies in general by demonstrating visualizations of geospatial data and their relationships.