Required elements of a geographic ontology

Abstract

The present work tackles the problem of ontology design for the scientific domain of geography, from scratch. First the desiderata of ontologies are analyzed regarding the elements that constitute these ontologies (the lexicon, the concepts, the relations and the axioms). Moreover, several characteristics of the geographic concepts that have puzzled the geographic information scientists, and  resent key-points of geographic ontological research are exposed herein. Taking into consideration the aforementioned dimensions of the problem and using as vehicle previous research in the analysis of existing geographic ontologies, the quality and their  weaknesses -if any- in robustness and sufficiency are revealed. This "meta-ontological" approach leads to the establishment of a framework for designing robust geographic ontologies that will be "context-aware" and will bear the semantics of the scientific domain in question.