GEON: Ontology-Enabled Map Integration

In the GEON project we are developing an interoperability system on top of ArcIMS for registering spatial data sets to ontologies and subsequently querying registered data sets through the ontologies for map rendering. The system consists an ontology repository, a data set registration procedure, and a query rewriting system. User-defined ontologies are imported as OWL files and saved in the ontology repository. Structural and semantic heterogeneities of data sources are resolved using information from the data set registration procedure and ontologies. Those are used when rewriting user queries (e.g., a geologic age or rock type will expand to their corresponding “sub-concepts” in the rewritten query). Multiple ontologies are supported in the system by allowing users to define an articulation between two ontologies which equates some concepts in the source ontology to some concepts in the target ontology. Users are able to switch between ontologies for which an articulation exists.