Proceedings Article | 29 December 2008
KEYWORDS: Logic, Data modeling, Geographic information systems, Web services, Global system for mobile communications, Cognitive modeling, Data processing, Cognition, Artificial intelligence, Information technology
GML can only achieve geospatial interoperation at syntactic level. However, it is necessary to resolve difference of
spatial cognition in the first place in most occasions, so ontology was introduced to describe geospatial information and
services. But it is obviously difficult and improper to let users to find, match and compose services, especially in some
occasions there are complicated business logics. Currently, with the gradual introduction of Semantic Web technology
(e.g., OWL, SWRL), the focus of the interoperation of geospatial information has shifted from syntactic level to
Semantic and even automatic, intelligent level. In this way, Geospatial Semantic Web (GSM) can be put forward as an
augmentation to the Semantic Web that additionally includes geospatial abstractions as well as related reasoning,
representation and query mechanisms. To advance the implementation of GSM, we first attempt to construct the
mechanism of modeling and formal representation of geospatial knowledge, which are also two mostly foundational
phases in knowledge engineering (KE). Our attitude in this paper is quite pragmatical: we argue that geospatial context is
a formal model of the discriminate environment characters of geospatial knowledge, and the derivation, understanding
and using of geospatial knowledge are located in geospatial context. Therefore, first, we put forward a primitive
hierarchy of geospatial knowledge referencing first order logic, formal ontologies, rules and GML. Second, a metamodel
of geospatial context is proposed and we use the modeling methods and representation languages of formal
ontologies to process geospatial context. Thirdly, we extend Web Process Service (WPS) to be compatible with local
DLL for geoprocessing and possess inference capability based on OWL.
