GeOnt: geo-ontologies integration tool.

In Geographic Information Science, the concept of semantic interoperability has been proposed to simplify and enhance the sharing, reuse and integration of geographic data. Semantic interoperability can be achieved by integrating semantic components and necessarily involves the detection and resolution of semantic conflicts that may exist between these components. The use of ontologies, although it allows to partially solve semantic conflicts, does not completely solve heterogeneity issues. Heterogeneity issues can be solved by the integration of ontologies, an issue that we address in this paper through geo-ontologies. Geo-ontologies describe conceptual hierarchies and interrelations of terminologies in the domain of geospatial science. This paper proposes an approach for integrating geospatial ontologies based on three processes: matching, mapping and integration. The GeOnt tool has been developed to automatically integrate geo-ontologies. Experiments are conducted on real data and an evaluation of the ...