Comparing categories among geographic ontologies

Numerous attempts have been made to generate semantic “mappings” between different ontologies, or create aligned/integrated ones. An essential step towards their success is the ability to compare the categories involved. This paper introduces a systematic methodology for comparing categories met in geographic ontologies. The methodology explores/extracts semantic information provided by categories' definitions. The first step towards this goal is the recognition of syntactic and lexical patterns in definitions, which help to identify (a) semantic properties such as purpose, location, cover, and (b) semantic relations such as hypernym, part of, has-parts, etc. At the second step, a similarity measure among categories is applied, in order to explore how (the) extracted properties and relations interrelate. This framework enables us to (a) better understand the impact of context in cross-ontology “mappings”, (b) evaluate the “quality” of definitions as to whether they respect mere ontological aspects (such as unambiguous taxonomies), and (c) deal more effectively with the problem of semantic translation among geographic ontologies.