Establishing Similarity across Multi-granular Topological-Relation Ontologies

Within the Geospatial Semantic Web, selecting a different ontology for a spatial data set will enable that data’s analysis in a different context. Analyses of multiple data sets, each based on a different ontology, require appropriate bridges across the ontologies. This paper focuses on establishing such a bridge across two topological-relation ontologies of different granularity—the standard eight detailed toplogical relations and five coarse topological relations. By mapping the conceptual neighborhood graphs onto a zonal representation, the different granularities are aligned spatially, yielding a reasoned approach to determining similarity values for the bridges across the two ontologies. A comparison with bridge lengths from an averaged model shows the better quality of zonal model.