(Geo) spatial Ontologies for the Web

This wiki area is for work on initial / basic geospatial ontologies for the Web. Candidates for these jumpstart or consensus ontologies seem to fall into 7 components:

Geospatial Feature Ontology

This component should follow ISO and OGC standards for feature discernment (General Feature Model)

Resources

See attached document for 4 proposed additions to the spatial ontologies from an ontology study project on GeoSemantic Web (U.S. govt contract) W3C spatial ontology additions.doc

Discussion

Contributions

Feature Type Ontology

This component might be thought of as the "50 types of features that everyone can agree on".

Resources

Administrative Boundaries

The Ordnance Survey has published an ontology of administrative boundaries in the UK, which can be found at http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology along with ontologies for other feature types.

Discussion

Contributions

(Geo) spatial Relationship Ontology

There are at least 8 commonly accepted 2D topological relationships such as RCC8 or Egenhofer relations, but there are probably a number of other "vernacular" relationships which would be useful, such as "next-door-to".

Resources

Discussion

Contributions

Toponym (Place name) Ontology

Place names are an important means of geolocating resources, at least to some approximation. Some work has been done on globally useful placename ontologies and individual, but not really brought together as a common reference.

Resources

Discussion

Contributions

Coordinate Reference / Spatial Grid Ontology

The flip side (TCP-IP to DNS) of place names are coordinate reference systems (CRS) and spatial grids. While WGS84 might be sufficient globally, other CRS's are important for local geography or different views of the globe (e.g. polar). A useful quantitative way of both geolocating and indexing resources involves identifying the grid cell of a geospatial grid scheme (pyramid of successively smaller cell sizes). A correspondence between grid scheme and map tile scheme would allow map tiles to easily be discovered along with co-located resources.

Resources

Discussion

Contributions

Geospatial Metadata Ontology

Yes, metadata is dull, but data quality and provenance are critical to deriving real benefit from geography and geolocation on the Web.

Resources

Discussion

Contributions

(Geospatial) Web Services Ontology

Evolving standards such as OWL-S have raised the bar on formal and actionable descriptions of Web services, but elaborations are needed of the manner in which the closely coupled content of geospatial Web services affects the process model and behavior.