A Facet-Based Methodology for Geo-Spatial Modeling

Space, together with time, is one of the two fundamental dimensions of the universe of knowledge. Geo-spatial ontologies are essential for our shared understanding of the physical universe and to achieve semantic interoperability between people and between software agents. In this paper we propose a methodology and a minimal set of guiding principles, mainly inspired by the faceted approach, to produce high quality ontologies in terms of robustness, extensibility, reusability, compactness and flexibility. We demonstrate - with step by steps examples - that by applying the methodology and those principles we can model the space domain and produce a high quality facet-based large scale geo-spatial ontology comprising entities, entity classes, spatial relations and attributes.