Building Place Name Ontology to Assist in Geographic Information Retrieval

Most state-of-the-art gazetteers have many limitations when they are utilized as background knowledge in geographic information retrieval (GIR). Considering that people often use place names in GIR instead of geographic coordinates, in this paper we propose to build a place name ontology (PNO) and implement PNO knowledge base (PNOKB) to take the place of gazetteers. PNO, which is made up of places and spatial relationships, can be viewed as the direct model of geographically named locations. It is based on mereology, topology, and location theory and it is built with OWL DL. This paper sets out GIR and gazetteers' limitations, describes from ontology, geo-ontology to PNO, introduces OWL and three theoretical tools, and then explores how to design PNO's concept model and how to implement PNOKB in detail.