A semi-automatic lightweight ontology bridging for the semantic integration of cross-domain geospatial information

Semantic integration has gained considerable attention in geographic information system (GIS) interoperability with the goal of conquering semantic heterogeneity. Over the past two decades, ontology engineering has been widely used to resolve semantic integration obstacles. However, most of the previous ontology integration approaches mainly focused on the same type of data with formal ontology. A key challenge is to identify the semantics of cross-domain data generated by different domains from their own perspectives. Given that formal ontology is not always available, this paper proposes a novel semi-automatic approach to determine the semantic relationship of cross-domain concepts based on lightweight ontologies. The semantics of each concept is presented by an extendable and structural definition framework composed of a number of resource description framework triple statements formed by common vocabularies extracted from the free-text definition of the concept. We further propose algorithms to compare the structural definition of concepts and to determine the semantic relationship of concepts between different domains. Finally, the semantic relationship of concepts from different domains is formally presented by the bridge ontology to serve future application needs. The bridge ontology of two GIS-based data, topographic map data and land use data, was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. The preliminary result shows a faithful and highly automatic semantic integration for cross-domain data.