Ontology Based Semantic Integration of Heterogeneous Geographical Information Systems

Reusing data produced by other sources is the main motivation of system interoperability and data integration; enterprises tend to reduce their investment for producing data by integrating outsourced data. With the geographic information systems (GIS) community the scenario is not different. Data integration process has to resolve the differences in data structures, as well as, solving semantic heterogeneities. We consider ontologies as knowledge structures that specify terms, their properties and relations among them to enable integration. The presented approach integrates schemata of different GIS, where each GIS is using its own Geo-ontology. To reach our goal the concept of semantic similarity is used and the similarity relations between heterogeneous ontologies are discovered by reasoning system using the high level ontology WordNet. The output of the system is semantic similarity measure that is a confidence score that reflects the semantic relation between the meanings of two concepts.