Towards an Integrated GIS Framework for Managing Environmental Data

Ontology is deemed as an effective means in the field of information integration. However, environmental data, which involves various kinds of data such as spatio-temporal data about air, land, water as well as non nature data about social and economic issues, is quite distinct to general data. Currently how to use ontology for environmental data integration was seldom discussed. This paper presents the hierarchical structure of environmental ontology and gives a method of modeling environmental data using ontology. Then an ontology-based GIS framework for integrating and managing environmental data is proposed.