A study of semantic retrieval system based on geo-ontology with spatio-temporal characteristic

The development of GIS (geographic information system) and the production of a great many geographic data everyday demand a new semantic retrieval system for geographic information. This paper analyzes the requirement of geospatial and temporal extendibility and reasoning for geographic information retrieval. Then architecture of semantic retrieval based on domain ontologies is illustrated, and every component in the architecture is introduced one by one. The goal of this paper is to explore the application of ontologies in the field of geographical information retrieval. How to create geospatial ontology and temporal ontology are respectively discussed in this paper. And a case of geospatial ontology of China is described. Finally, the future work and a prototype application are mentioned in conclusion, in which we can see that the semantic retrieval system will play a key role in future.