We've created three ontologies for geoStuff which express a base set of geographic features such as countries and cities,
their spatial descriptors such as points and multipolygons, and relationships between these spatial descriptors, as described below.
Although it would be nice to translate the OGC's official GML specification to an ontology,
none of us have a spare lifetime or two. Here is a sample mapping of GML to our ontology. There are also samples
in the ontologies themselves.
For versioning, the latest version of each ontology can be linked to by the following links. However, please note that there is a unique URI for
each ontology (specified in the ontology) that is defined by the version number in the associated change log. For example, an ontology may be linked
to with http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoFeatures.owl but will also have the unique URI of http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoFeatures20040307.owl
which defines the date of last modification and is the concatenation of the changeLog's versionNumber and file URI. We have created a
changeLog ontology which is used to define the change
logs for each ontology.
The person to yell at for this (preferably with helpful suggestions) is Femke
The geoFeatures ontology specifies some key geographic feature classes as well as classes for describing their spatial characteristics. You
may notice a number of strange classes in the ontology. These classes are a direct mapping to the data we are using for our services.
Latest version:
http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoFeatures.owl
Change log:
http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoFeaturesChangeLog.owl
The geoRelations ontology specifies mereological, topological, distance, and direction relations.
Latest version:
http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoRelations.owl
Change log:
http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoRelationsChangeLog.owl
The geoCoordinateSystems ontology is very incomplete as yet. Largely its a problem of finding the time to dig up the numerous different
coordinate systems. However, we have described the main ones.
Latest version:
http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoCoordinateSystems.owl
Change log:
http://www.mindswap.org/2003/owl/geo/geoCoordinateSystemsChangeLog.owl