Specification for a Shared Conceptual Layer in GIS
Résumé
During the last decade, GIS have suffered of the lack of structured information and semantic definition of the data. The numerous origins of the data and the spatial localization of the object inferred many inconsistencies among them. Indeed, the way to collect data and the level of sampling of the boundary differ from one application to another and from one expert to another. This leads to different representations of the same reality and different models of semantically identical objects or boundaries. To allow the matching of the objects, or parts of the objects, when combining different information layers we introduced a conceptual layer which described a scene with concepts and spatial relationships based on the definition of an ontology. This layer allows detecting and solving conflicts between the common boundaries of two objects. We present in this paper the specification and the way to build and use the ontology.