An intelligent bay geo-information retrieval approach based on Geo-ontology

In the era of information explosion, information retrieval has become a bottleneck in information sharing and integration. However currently, the existing information retrieval methods are mainly based on keyword matching, which can not fully take advantage of the information context and potential knowledge. All of these methods are particularly inefficient as to geospatial information which is more complex and unstructured. Nevertheless, geospatial ontology (Geo-ontology) has been used to enrich geospatial objects with semantic information which could be very helpful in the geospatial information retrieval and integration. And there is a wealth of relations between objects (such as the relation between bay and the inter-tidal zone) in bay field. Thus in this paper, an intelligent bay geo-information retrieval approach based on bay geo-information ontology has been proposed. Firstly, the procedure of establishing the bay geo-information ontology database is introduced. Secondly, both the intelligent retrieval mechanism and approach in bay geo-information are expatiated, which are used to convert the user retrievals request to semantic request and map the semantic request to concrete query of actual data source by adopting the knowledge that´s explicitly expressed in formal ontology modeling language (OWL). Finally, the method was applied in the bay information management system, and the feasibility and efficacy of the geo-information retrieval approach is well verified.