Representing and Reasoning for Spatiotemporal Ontology Integration

2004

International audience; The World-Wide Web hosts many autonomous and heterogeneous information sources. In the near future each source may be described by its own ontology. The distributed nature of ontology development will lead to a large number of local ontologies covering overlapping domains. Ontology integration will then become an essential capability for effective interoperability and information sharing. Integration is known to be a hard problem, whose complexity increases particularly in the presence of spatiotemporal information. Space and time entail additional problems such as the heterogeneity of granularity used in representing spatial and temporal features. Spatio-temporal ob…