The role of engineering education for semantic retrieval of geographic objects based on ontological descriptions and conceptual schemas

Geospatial information retrieval is not a trivial task. An integrated view must be able to describe various heterogeneous data sources and its interrelation to obtain shared conceptualizations. Ontology engineering is rapidly becoming a mature discipline, which has produced several tools and methodologies for building and managing ontologies for different purposes. In this paper, a methodology to semantically retrieve geospatial information based on ontological descriptions and conceptual schemas is proposed. It consists of providing semantic representations, which explicitly describe the properties and relationships of geographic objects represented by concepts, while the behavior describes the objects semantics. The work presents a methodology to integrate and share geospatial information. The approach is driven by application ontology, which has been designed using the GEONTO-MET methodology. The workis intended to establish the basis for the semantic processing oriented towards semantic information integration and retrieval. The semantic retrieval is an approach very useful in applications focused on semantic web and e-learning in order to process and infer knowledge with a wide range tools in Engineering Education.