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Iberoamerican Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web Conference

KGSWC 2019: Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web pp 118–133Cite as

Automated Large Geographic Ontologies Generation Method from Spatial Databases

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1029))

Abstract

Ontologies have emerged as an important component in Information Systems and, specifically, in Geographic Information Systems, where they play a key role. However, the creation and maintenance of geographic ontologies can become an exhausting work due to the rapid growth and availability of spatial data, which are provided through relational databases most times. For this reason there has been an increasing interest in the automatic generation of geographic ontologies from relational databases in recent years. This work describes an automatic method to generate a geographic ontology from the spatial data provided by a relational database. The importance and originality of this study lie in that it is able to model two main aspects of a spatial database in the generated ontology: (1) The three main types of spatial data (point, line and polygon) are modelled as a data property and not as an object property. (2) Four data integrity constraints: First Normal Form, Not Null, Unique and Primary Key. Another contribution of our proposal is related to the support for generating large ontologies, which are not usually supported by traditional tools of ontological engineering such as Protégé or OWL API. Finally, some experiments were conducted in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The preliminary ontology is called Ontobasic and it is available at http://sinai.ujaen.es/ontobasic.

  2. 2.

    http://www.geonames.org.

  3. 3.

    Well-Known Text (WKT) is a text markup language for representing vector geometry objects on a map, spatial reference systems of spatial objects and transformations between spatial reference systems (Wikipedia).

  4. 4.

    http://github.com/Esri/geometry-api-java.

  5. 5.

    http://owlcs.github.io/owlapi.

  6. 6.

    https://www.geocuba.cu.

  7. 7.

    A backup of the SDB generated is available at http://sinai.ujaen.es/bde-geocuba.

  8. 8.

    http://sinai.ujaen.es/ontogeocuba.

  9. 9.

    http://www.opengeospatial.org.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by FEDER and the State Research Agency (AEI) of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competition under grant MERINET: TIN2016-76843-C4-2-R (AEI/FEDER, UE).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, La Habana, Cuba

    Manuel E. Puebla-Martínez

  2. Universidad de Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain

    José M. Perea-Ortega

  3. Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana José Antonio Echeverría, La Habana, Cuba

    Alfredo Simón-Cuevas

  4. Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Francisco P. Romero & José A. Olivas Varela

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  1. Manuel E. Puebla-Martínez
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Correspondence to José M. Perea-Ortega .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Arvato Bertelsmann, Madrid, Spain

    Boris Villazón-Terrazas

  2. Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, Havana, Cuba

    Yusniel Hidalgo-Delgado

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Puebla-Martínez, M.E., Perea-Ortega, J.M., Simón-Cuevas, A., Romero, F.P., Varela, J.A.O. (2019). Automated Large Geographic Ontologies Generation Method from Spatial Databases. In: Villazón-Terrazas, B., Hidalgo-Delgado, Y. (eds) Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web. KGSWC 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1029. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21395-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21395-4_9

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