Extracting Spatial Semantics to Support the Development of Geospatial Ontologies on the Semantic Web

Geo-ontologies have a key role to play in the development of the geospatial-semantic web, with regard to facilitating the search for geographical information and resources. They normally hold large amounts of geographic information and undergo a continuous process of revision and update. Hence, means of ensuring their integrity are crucial and needed to allow them to serve their purpose. This paper proposes a novel qualitative representation scheme to structure geoontology A-Boxes. The scheme captures two types of spatial relationships between geo-objects, namely, adjacency and orientation. It facilitates qualitative manipulation of the data and the efficient derivation of implicit information using spatial reasoning techniques.