Maintaining Ontologies for Geographical Information Retrieval on the Web

A geo-ontology has a key role to play in the development of a spatially-aware search engine, with regard to providing support for query disambiguation, query term expansion, relevance ranking and web resource annotation. This paper reviews these functions, discusses the user requirements which influence the design of the ontology, with regard to different types of query and fundamental spatial concepts, before presenting a base model for a geographical ontology which will provide a foundation for subsequent implementation as well as experimentation with alternative ontology models. The report also reviews various ontology languages available for expressing ontologies and give examples for encoding the geo-ontology in them.