Ontology-Driven Semantic Comparison between Geographic Data Sets

Abstract

In this paper a methodology for making the comparison and assessment of geographic datasets (CDG) with a semantic approach is presented. It is carried out by means of the processing of conceptual representations, in a particular case with ontologies. It is important to mention that the most of works related to CDG comparison use syntactic approaches for the analysis, according to above we propose to change this focus with semantic approaches. The methodology is composed of four stages. Conceptualization, where by using metadata from the CDGs the application ontology is generated. The enrichment stage consists in populating the ontology with data in order to create an enriched ontology for each CDG to compare. At the comparison stage, a set of algorithms for measuring the similarity between the properties and relationships of the enriched ontologies is developed. Finally, the interpretation and representation stages are in charge of showing the results of the CDGs comparison. As a case study, two Mexican government institutions provided the CDGs in order to make the comparison and assessment.