Semantic integration for mapping the underworld

Utility infrastructure is vital to the daily life of modern society. As the vast majority of urban utility assets are buried underneath public roads, the need to install/repair utility assets often requires opening ground with busy traffic. Unfortunately, at present most excavation works are carried out without knowing exactly what is where, which causes far more street breakings than necessary. This research studies how maximum benefit can be gained from the existing knowledge of buried assets. The key challenge here is that utility data is heterogeneous, which arises due to different domain perceptions and varying data modelling practices. This research investigates factors which prevent utility knowledge from being fully exploited and suggests that integration techniques can be applied for reconciling semantic heterogeneity within the utility domain. In this paper we discuss the feasibility of a common utility ontology to describe underground assets, and present techniques for constructing a basic utility ontology in the form of a thesaurus. The paper also demonstrates how the utility thesaurus developed is employed as a shared ontology for mapping utility data. Experiments have been performed to evaluate the techniques proposed, and feedback from industrial partners is encouraging and shows that techniques work effectively with real world utility data.