Towards a Context Ontology for Geospatial Data Integration

Recently, Geospatial data and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been increasingly used. As a result, the integration of geospatial data has become a crucial task for decision makers. Since GIS and geospatial databases are designed by different organizations using different representation models and there are diverse levels of detail for the spatial features, it is much more complex to achieve data integration in geospatial databases. To help matters, context information may be employed to improve two fundamental aspects in Geospatial Data Integration: (1) schema mapping generation and (2) query answering. However, a relevant issue when using context is how to better represent context information. Ontologies are an interesting approach to represent context, since they enable sharing and reusability and help reasoning. In this paper, we propose a context ontology to formally represent context in geospatial data integration. We also present an example where this context ontology is used to improve query processing.