ONTOLOGY FOR GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Conclusions

v An ontology about geographic information of Loja Province has been presented in this paper. This ontology allows us to perform quires on political and administrative division, constructions, geographic accidents, hydrographical elements, and types of roads in Loja province.

v The search and classification of metadata are important for a Geographical Information system. The ontology is used to structure all the process of its representations and even its display on the WEB.

v Creating classes, sub-classes, and properties is not enough. It is necessary to define the properties which together with the definition of conditions or constraints for each class allows us to create the knowledge base.

v Although OSIG was developed in a Geographical Information System of the province of Loja, there is an open discussion about reusing this ontology for a Geographical Information System of any place The concepts that are part of OSIG are considered basic and necessary for any Geographical Information System. OSIG can be reused and extended with a brief adaptation according to specific needs, thus, fulfilling the fundamental characteristics of extensibility and reusing.

v In an ontology, the classes can form inheritance hierarchies just like the classes in the Object Oriented Programming, so that each child class will inherit the attributes and relations of their father class and distinct levels of hierarchy are permitted. It is recommended that this inheritance must not be very deep because semantics can be lost. The father classes represent a more abstract concept of domain.

v It is essential to create an ontology for GSI because it allows us to observe its components in a clear way, the way how they are linked and how a knowledge rule that permits to classify the GSI objects is fired. [1]

v The web portal only accepts queries related to the instances that are stored in the ontology.
[1] ESRI e ISO ya se encuentran presentando propuestas para la construcción del nuevo software aplicando bases ontológicas.

ESRI and ISO are presenting proposals for developing new software by applying ontological basis.