Centro de Investigación en Computación del IPN

In this dissertation the GEONTO–MET methodology is presented. It is oriented to formalize the geographic domain conceptualization according to the specifications of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI). The main goal is to provide semantic descriptions, which represent the properties and relations describing so the behavior of geographic objects and taking into account these features directly from the geographic domain ontology. The thesis also establishes a solid basis for future automatic interpretations of geographic regions oriented to decision making process. In other words, the geographic domain conceptualization can be used to generate new knowledge in an automatic way and make spatial analysis more accurate. Having a semantic description of a geographic domain allows establishing the guidelines of a spatial reasoning. That is, if the behavior of geographic objects involved in an ontology partition is known, then one can understand and interpret the semantics that they represent and explore the implicit inference from the conceptualization. Summing up, this work presents a methodology allowing integrate and share geospatial information. GEONTO –MET provides feasible solutions towards these and other related issues, such as compact data by alternative structures of knowledge representation and avoid the ambiguity of terms, using a domain conceptualization.