GEONTO-MET: an approach to conceptualizing the geographic domain

To date, there are different ontologies for many domains and applications. Users can access them to share information, reuse knowledge, and integrate data sources for several purposes and applications such as semantic web, data warehousing, e-learning, e-commerce, knowledge representation, and so on. Ontology engineering is rapidly becoming a mature discipline, having produced tools and methodologies for building and managing ontologies. However, even with a clearly defined engineering methodology, building an ontology remains a challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone task, because it forces ontology builders to conceptualize their expert knowledge explicitly and to re-organize it in typical ontological categories such as concepts, properties, and axioms. In this article, an approach to conceptualizing the geographic domain is described. It is oriented toward formalizing a geographic domain conceptualization according to specifications from the Mexican Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics. The main goal is to provide semantic and ontological descriptions, which represent the properties and relationships that describe the behavior of geographic objects by means of concepts. GEONTO-MET is focused on developing geographic application ontologies for sharing and integrating geospatial information.