An Ontology-Based Framework for Geographic Data Integration

Ontologies have been extensively used to model domain-specific knowledge. Recent research has applied ontologies to enhance the discovery and retrieval of geographic data in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). However, in those approaches it is assumed that all the data required for answering a query can be obtained from a single data source. In this work, we propose an ontology-based framework for the integration of geographic data. In our approach, a query posed on a domain ontology is rewritten into sub-queries submitted over multiples data sources, and the query result is obtained by the proper combination of data resulting from these sub-queries. We illustrate how our framework allows the combination of data from different sources, thus overcoming some limitations of other ontology-based approaches. Our approach is illustrated by an example from the domain of aeronautical flights.