Experiences of Using OWL at the Ordnance Survey

Current developments within the information technology industry are creating new opportunities for traditional information suppliers such as Ordnance Survey. In particular the ability to electronically trade information creates opportunities to increase the use of Ordnance Survey’s topographic information in ways that can be go beyond the delivery of such data in the form of a map. The future development of a semantic web may create new business opportunities particularly for the mobile connected user who may access Ordnance Survey information through an application without ever realising it. More generally the ability to semantically translate between one information source and others may reduce both the time and cost of services better enabling joined-up government and industry. In response to these challenges Ordnance Survey has embarked upon research to investigate the development of a topographic ontology to underpin our data and to investigate how it may be used to support interoperation with other information sources and information based services. This paper describes our thoughts and experiences on the development of an ontology using the Web Ontology Language (OWL DL). 1 Writing Ontologies The first thing that became obvious during our initial attempts to write an ontology, even before one worries about the complexities of OWL, is that knowledge engineering is hard and, as with most organisations, there is rarely one individual that is both a domain expert and ontology expert. Furthermore, initial attempts to construct our ontology were far too language driven and as a result would often fail to identify and fully describe key concepts in our domain.