Towards a methodology to conceptualize the geographic domain

To date, there are different ontologies for many domains and applications. Users can access them in order to share information, reuse knowledge and integrate data sources for several purposes such as semantic web, data warehouse, e-learning, e-commerce, knowledge representation and so on. Ontology engineering is rapidly becoming a mature discipline, having produced tools and methodologies for building and managing ontologies. However, even with a clearly defined engineering methodology, building a large ontology remains a challenging, time-consuming and error-prone task, since it forces ontology builders to conceptualize their expert knowledge explicitly and to re-organize it in typical ontological categories such as concepts, properties and axioms. An approach to conceptualizing the geographic domain is described. It is oriented to formalize the geographic domain conceptualization according to specifications from the INEGI. The main goal is to provide semantic and ontological descriptions, which represent the properties and relations that describe the behavior of geographic objects by means of concepts. GEONTO-MET is focused on developing geographic application ontologies for the sharing and integrating of geospatial information.