Nature of Geographic Knowledge Bases

Abstract

In many domains such as environmental and urban planning, experts need to make reasoning and propose solutions. However marketed GIS software products are limited to store, display geographic information together with additional tools such as in spatial analysis, but they do not offer users the real functionalities which are useful for territorial intelligence. This first step is to propose novel models to represent this kind of knowledge needing not only to integrate geographic aspects, but also be independent of data acquisition technologies (satellite images, laser, crowdsourcing, etc.) and able to be used in different languages. After the definitions of geographic ontologies (to organize geographic feature vocabulary) and gazetteers (to structure toponyms in various languages), various examples will be presented in order to extract geographic semantics. A special attention will be devoted to geographic rules.