Formal representation of geographic ontology and its application in map services

Geographic ontology is a very complex and intricate concept. As a philosophical concept, ontology has the most ambiguous meanings. In the paper, firstly the concept of geographic ontology is explored and the three meanings of geographic ontology are put forward: philosophy ontology, information ontology and spatial ontology. Then it introduces some ontology representation languages and concludes by suggesting OWL as the appropriate language for building geographic ontology. But geographic ontology is quite distinct from the general information ontology in that it should represent spatial properties as well as attribute properties. Unfortunately, OWL cannot describe spatial properties and spatial relations of geographic ontology because they are mainly for representing the general information ontology. It puts forward to build some formal axioms about spatial properties of geographic ontology by use of three theoretical tools: mereology, location theory and topology. With these axioms, we can formally represent geographic ontology with spatial properties. Finally, it shows how we can use geographic ontology to describe map services and to improve the quality of map services.