Ontology-Based Geographical Information Sharing in E-government Constructing

Geographical information (GI), which is the key to effective planning and decision-making in a variety of application domains, not least in the Earth Sciences, shows its increasingly importance in E-government constructing and has been applied widely, as many GIS-based E-government systems have been constructed. The mode of geographical information sharing is important to E-government constructing as it has a direct effect on application extent and profundity of E-government. Ontology is the theory that uses a specific vocabulary to describe entities, classes, properties and functions related to a certain view of the world. As the convincing instrument on establishing the conceptual model, and its latent advantages in solving the heterogeneity of various data resources, interoperability and integration, ontology has held Scientists' interest internationally. This paper focuses on the application schema of ontology-based geographical information sharing in E-government constructing. The specifications provided by the OpenGIS-Consortium (OCC) enable syntactic interoperability and cataloguing of geographic information. However, while OGC-compliant catalogues support discovery, organization, and access of geographic information, the), do not yet provide methods for overcoming problems of semantic heterogeneity. These problems still present inconsistency between expanded rapidly geographical data and dissatisfaction of the user, and challenges for the GI sharing in the open and distributed environments of e-government. One possible approach to overcome the problem of semantic heterogeneity is the explication of knowledge by means of ontology, which can be used for the identification and association of semantically corresponding concepts. This paper describes the architecture for ontology-based geographic information sharing in e-government. The paper is structured as follows. We first introduce the actuality of the geographical information sharing in e-government and the problems existing; discuss the significance of the research on ontology-based geographical information sharing in e-government constructing. In section 2 we describe the analysis of semantic heterogeneity in e-government. Section 3 presented the ontology-based approach in ecosystem monitoring & management system for border area of Yunnan province. The steps of designing geographical information ontology is described in section 4. We conclude the paper by pointing out open questions to be dealt with in future research.