An Ontology-Based Approach for Geographic Information Retrieval on the Web

Finding and accessing suitable geographic information in the open and distributed Web environment of current geographic information services (GIServices) is a crucial task. Problems of semantic heterogeneity arise during an exact word matching search for GIServices and spatial database. Moreover, there are only a few services registered in metadata catalogues so that we cannot ignore Web contents which also contain geographic information. This paper introduces an architecture of a spatially aware search engine, for semantic interoperability of distributed and heterogeneous GIS on the Internet. The proposed architecture is based on mediation and ontologies, which help to providing support for query disambiguation, query term expansion and Web resource retrieval. It also gives the structure of the location ontology and service ontology and shows the detail of semantic query process. Based on a real-world scenario of restaurant guide search, the application of our approach shows that the geographic information retrieval can be efficiently supported.