Thesaurus and Domain Ontology of Geoinformatics

Geoinformatics is a comparatively new interdisciplinary science and as a part of space informatics uses methods and terminology of informatics and many natural sciences. An ontology of geoinformatics is discussed in the paper, especially concerning its structure, relationships with other ontologies, resources for development and utilization. The ontology of geoinformatics is a kind of domain ontology and has a layered structure consisting of syntactic and semantic layers. The corpus of this ontology is an existing multilingual dictionary of geographical information systems (GIS) enriched with terminology from other external sources. The building of the ontology is preceded by the development of a taxonomy and thesaurus of geoinformatics. The thesaurus database is converted into an OWL ontology by a Visual Basic application. The reusing of the ontology is proposed by its transformation in application ontologies for geoinformatics education.