Establishing Similarity Across Multi-Granular Topological-Relation Ontologies

Matthew Dube and Max Egenhofer
QuaCon 2009 --- First International Workshop on Quality of Context, Stuttgart, Germany
K. Rothermel, D. Fritsch, W. Blochinger, and F. Dürr (eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5786, Springer, pp. 98-108, June 2009.

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Abstract

Within the Geospatial Semantic Web, selecting a different ontology for a spatial data set will enable that dataÕs analysis in a different context. Analyses of multiple data sets, each based on a different ontology, require appropriate bridges across the ontologies. This paper focuses on establishing such a bridge across two topological-relation ontologies of different granularity -- the standard eight detailed toplogical relations and five coarse topological relations. By mapping the conceptual neighborhood graphs onto a zonal representation, the different granularities are aligned spatially, yielding a reasoned approach to determining similarity values for the bridges across the two ontologies. A comparison with bridge lengths from an averaged model shows the better quality of zonal model.

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