Two types of hierarchies in geospatial ontologies

Abstract

Geospatial ontologies contain hierarchical structures, which are either based on the taxonomy of entity classes or functions and roles these entities can take. While the taxonomic hierarchies can be extracted from noun phrases contained in the formal texts that describe the geospatial domain, the hierarchies of action concepts can be traced from the verb phrases. This paper reports a simple case study of extracting the two types of such hierarchies from formal texts of traffic code. Problems of concurrent use of both hierarchies for ontology reasoning are dis-cussed, particularly, in context of the different views on geospatial ontologies. An approach based on separation of action and entity concepts. Use of probabilistic linkages between entities and actions is discussed as a way for integration of the two views. The initial results of this approach provide a first step towards an integration of the two existing views in the geospatial domain.