Ontology-Based Integrated Information Platform for Digital City

Information integration develops toward semantic integration on the Semantic Web. Ontology facilitates the integration of heterogeneous data sources by resolving semantic heterogeneity among them. In this paper, we propose the system architecture of integrated information platform for digital city based on ontology, including three main layers: distributed heterogeneous data source layer, information integration layer, and application system layer. Its core is the information integration layer including the ontology server and the integrated database. Then, the domain ontology model for digital city is presented. Furthermore, we realize the semantic information retrieval according to the relations of "synonymy of, "kind of and "part of between concepts. At the end we conclude that ontology is a good tool to integrate information among various heterogeneous urban management systems on semantic level.