An ontology framework for quality of geographical information services

In recent years, there has been much research on ontologies for geographic information (GI) services. But to date, focus has been on semantics of data and operations. Much less attention has been given to semantics of quality of GI services. In addressing this gap, this paper proposes an ontology framework for quality of GI services. The framework has an upper ontology, two primary domain ontologies and potentially many application ontologies. The ontologies provide concepts for unambiguously defining and reasoning about quality of GI services. We see the main strength of the framework as being its holistic view of quality; it integrates data quality and quality of service (QoS) which hitherto have been defined separately. Besides, the framework builds on established data quality and QoS concepts which guarantees its relevance and acceptance.