The Research on Hierarchical Construction Method of Domain Ontology

The proposal and development of semantic web make ontology, as a new knowledge organization and semantic description method, get attention in various fields. The building of ontology is a basic and important task in semantic web. The construction method and organizational structure of ontology will directly affect the application of ontology. Based on the analysis of hierarchical characters existing in domain knowledge representation and organization and also the process of ontology building, this paper puts forwards a hierarchical construction method of ontology and gives the hierarchical construction principles in different ontology levels, which pays much attention to the hierarchical relationships in every stage of ontology building. And then based on this hierarchical construction method, this paper designs and builds a three-level geographical ontology applied in spatial information service. And also, this paper presents a description mechanism of ontology class metainformation to extend the description capability of OWL, which can help to well represent the difference and relationship between concept and term. The hierarchical identification in class meta-information can help to realize quick retrieving and matching of concepts based on hierarchical relationship.