Ontology Based Approach for geospatial Semantic Web

ABSTRACT: Semantic web facilitates a new generation of web applications. It has been applied in many fields so far, e.g. for medicine, bioinformatics, social web. Up to now, the semantic web is well known as an effective infrastructure to enhance visibility of knowledge on the web. It provides a common interoperable framework in which information is given a well-defined meaning such that data and application can be used by machines (e.g. reasoning) for more effective discovery, automation, integration and reuse across various application, enterprise and community boundaries. The semantic web is based upon an ontology approach. However, in the field of geospatial domain, the ontology approach for web application is not very popular. In this paper, we first briefly present the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Schema (RDFS) as a metadata model for conceptual description or modelling of information that is implemented in web resources as also Web Ontology Language (OWL) for authoring ontologies which is the primarily supported language for semantic web, and then review the recent ontology approach in the geospatial domain. We will discuss about the lack of efficient ways to find user requested, suitable information in a data warehouse system. Based on the discussion, we will present an ontology based approach for a water-related information system. Our approach aims to provide an intelligent information query tool based on different applications/purposes. The proposed system will provide information appropriate to the user requirements with less or non prior knowledge of the underlying data