Ontology for Geographical Names Management and Retrieval

Geographical Names are key components of all georeferenced information systems, including GIS applications in many diverse fields of knowledge and services. This paper we focus on building an ontology for gazetteers, the ontology will better support the gazetteers applications, maintenances, and usability. The ontology contains place types, spatial and temporal concepts and their relations. We firstly establish a prototype of geographical name ontology. Secondly, we analyzed geographical names concepts and their semantics, to describe the knowledge structure for this field. Then we use OWL to provide a formal description for these concepts and relations and propose a unified semantic framework for the description of the geographical names information. Finally, we make an experiment by establishing ontology-based knowledge base. Through the analysis of examples we showed that ontology-based geographical names information can be shared and reused conveniently, and that the information retrieval by assistant of ontology can be easily realized.