An Ontology Design Pattern for Cartographic Map Scaling

The concepts of scale is at the core of cartographic abstraction and mapping. It defines which geographic phenomena should be displayed, which type of geometry and map symbol to use, which measures can be taken, as well as the degree to which features need to be exaggerated or spatially displaced. In this work, we present an ontology design pattern for map scaling using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) within a particular extension of the OWL RL profile. We explain how it can be used to describe scaling applications, to reason over scale levels, and geometric representations. We propose an axiomatization that allows us to impose meaningful constraints on the pattern, and, thus, to go beyond simple surface semantics. Interestingly, this includes several functional constraints currently not expressible in any of the OWL profiles. We show that for this specific scenario, the addition of such constraints does not increase the reasoning complexity which remains tractable.