Semantic Similarity Measures within the Semantic Framework of the Universal Ontology of Geographical Space

The objective of this paper is to discuss our methodology for comparing, searching and integrating geographic concepts. Searching for spatially oriented datasets could be illustrated by the complexity of the communication between the producer and user. The common vocabulary consists of a set of concepts describing the geographic space called universal ontology of geographical space (UOGS). We have defined the semantic parameters for measuring semantic similarities within the UOGS semantic framework and described our applicative approach to the similarity analyses of spatial databases. In order to test our results we have implemented the entire vocabulary as a set prolog fact. Following this we also implemented functionality such as the querying mechanism and the simple semantic similarity model, again as a set of prolog clauses. In addition to this, we applied prolog rules for the purpose of extracting semantic information describing geographic concepts and extracting it from natural language texts.