Ontology Alignment for Geospatial Information Systems∗

The problem of querying heterogeneous geospatial databases in distributed environment can be resolved through alignment of ontologies. That is establishing mappings between related concepts in the different ontologies without combining them. Ontology alignment facilitates the propagation of a single query written in terms of a specific ontology to other databases in terms of their own ontologies. For this purpose, we have implemented a tool that allows database experts to semi-automatically map concepts from one ontology to concepts in a different ontology. Our tool utilizes semi-automatic methods for propagating such mappings along the ontologies. In this paper we present the implementation of our tool and the principles behind our semi-automatic methods.