Hierarchical ontology development and semantics retrieval for land use data

Land use data is an important type of data in GIS application. Many domains use land use data to assess the impacts of human activities to the environment. To correctly facilitate the interoperable use of land use data at the semantics level, we proposed a hierarchical ontology for land use data in this paper. The developed land use ontology can appropriately record the hierarchical semantics relationship between different land use data types and include the definition of land use vocabulary to form crucial concepts that help users to further infer land use type following reasoning rules. A semantics-oriented geospatial data retrieval system is developed in Open environment to establish the links between the land use data and land use ontology. This enables users to query land use data from a semantic viewpoint using the knowledge modeled in the land use ontology.