Dictionary of Geographical Names of Cuba using Geospatial Semantic Web

Msc. Ing. Jos Luis Capote Fernndez (1), Msc. Ing. Rafael Cruz Iglesias (2), Msc. Lic. Guillermo Gonzlez Sures(3) (1) Software for Geomatics Departament. GEOCUBA, Cuba. capote@geocuba.cu (2) Software for Geomatics Departament. GEOCUBA, Cuba. rcruz@geocuba.cu (3) Software for Geomatics Departament. GEOCUBA, Cuba. guille@geocuba.cu Abstract This document describes the creation of the Web Application Geographic Names Dictionary of the Cuban Republic using Geospatial Semantic Web. Also describes the creation process of the geographic names ontology. The creation of this ontology is included in the CYTED IDEDES project goals and it is a use case of ontology integration. It starts on a database that contains the information related to a literary publication named Diccionario de Nombres Geogrficos de la Repblica de Cuba. This ontology has been created in a semiautomatic form using Jena semantic framework. The ontology was refined using protg and linking other ontologies to add axioms and relations with spatial meaning. It is also created a web application based on the Semantic IDE model established by the project CYTED IDEDES. Keywords: SDI, Geospatial Semantics, Ontology, Geographic names. 1. INTRODUCTION The geographic names layer is one of the most consulted in a SDI, because using it all elements related to a geographic name can be known. In the Republic of Cuba the national commission of Geographic Names works systematically normalizing the geographic names in the national territory and also the writing of accidents in foreign lands. As a result of this work is created the Cuban Geographic Names Dictionary (Diccionario de Nombres Geogrficos de Cuba). This literary work has detailed information about 4000 uniform toponimous, selected among the most significant in the country. (Comisin Nacional de Nombres Geogrficos, 2000) Starting in a data base created with this publication content, since 2007, an application is working in the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Republic of Cuba (IDERC). This application consumes services from web map server based on OGC WMS specification (de la Beaujardie're, 2004). Although it is one of the most visited applications in the portal, many users don't find the information that they are searching for. Some times because the information isnt available or because the application hasnt an interface based on the related geographic names concepts semantics. Thats why one of the goals of this work is to improve the information recovery when using this application.

Figure 1: Geographic Names Dictionary www.iderc.co.cu

2.

GEOGRAPHIC NAMES ONTOLOGY

In the CYTED IDEDES project (Delgado, 2006) is proposed a model of semantic SDI where the knowledge formalization has an important role. An ontology structure is proposed composing the semantic framework in the SDI (Kolas, Hebeler, & Dean, 2005). In this model the following ontology levels are proposed: Base Geospatial Ontology. SDI upper ontology. Feature Type Ontology. Geospatial Web Service Ontology. IDEDES domain ontologies. Spatial Filter Ontology

The geographic name ontology role can be seen at two levels. Some people can consider this ontology belonging to SDI upper ontology group because is one of the most consulted and generalized layer in many SDI. In this case the semantic interoperability between different SDI can be achieved when the geographic names domain is considered. The other point of view could be that the geographic names are a specific knowledge domain and its conceptualization could be useful at application level. The ontology is stored in OWL language (W3C, 2004). OWL is oriented to make formal and explicit the knowledge, not for be presented to a final user but to be used for the machine. The ontology was created using Protg 3.3.1, a tool for conceptualization and formalization of domain knowledge in form of ontology. 2.1. Ontology creation process

As it is explained previously the initial source of the ontology was a data base that contains all the information that was published in the Dictionary of Geographic Names of Cuba (Comisin Nacional de Nombres Geogrficos, 2000). Using the

semantic package Jena (Jena, 2008), in Java language, and interacting with the data base and the existing implicit relations between its entities. The ontology creation process begins with the creation of the class model, its relations and all the instances referred in the data base like geographic names. Once created the ontology, the software Protg was used to make its revision and validation as well as the evaluation using some control questions. In the validation of it the reasoner package Pellet was used (Pellet, 2008). This reasoner can be used by Protg to make the tasks of consistency checks, taxonomy evaluation and compute inferred types. The evaluation was made using SPARQL (Prud'hommeaux & Seaborne, 2007) from Protg and the ontology give the right answer to the questions made. 2.2. Interaction with other specifications and ontologies.

As in other ontologies in this some XML schemas that define referred types are used; this ontology, in its present state, is related to others XML Schema specifications. Some of these are still not part of any ontology but as they are compatible with RDF language (W3C-RDF, 1999) we can use on it. One useful traditional schema when developing ontologies is XSD that defines the types of the properties type data. Other schemes are used to guarantee the conformity with RDF and OWL. From the conceptual point of view two ontologies has a role more important; first is the geographic limits ontology. This ontology has been developed in a parallel way and defines the limits concepts used within this ontology. This ontology includes terms like Province, Municipality, Popular Council and others. The other built-in ontology is the Spatial Relation ontology. This ontology is a codification of the filter encoding specification (FES) (OGC, 2001). Using the terms included in this ontology we can define spatial axioms and restrictions between the different ontology concepts. 3. ELEMENTS INCLUDED IN THE ONTOLOGY

Although in the bibliography appears more toponyms classifications the developed ontology is limited to consider the terms obtained from the literary publication that originated it. For that reason only covers names referred to maritime, hydrological, inhabited places and relief accidents and the generics terms related to this classification. The amount of generic by classification can be shown in the Table 1. Classification Maritime Hydrological Inhabited places Relief Subclasses 7 12 29 34 Instances 1267 619 931 954

Table 1: subclasses and instances obtained from the primary classification of toponims.

3.1

Maritime accident names

The description of one term in this classification contains the following elements: Complete name. Geographical coordinates. Brief agreed description with the importance and particular dimensions of the accident and their characteristics.

Figure 2: Visualization of maritime accident names using protgs plugging Jambalaya.

The maritime accident names classification is divided in 29 subclasses (Figure 2) grouping 931 instances. 3.2 Hydrological accident names

The definition of a Hydrological accident name contains the following elements: Complete name. Location according to the slope in which one is. Location according to formation force and subunits of the relief. Geographical coordinates. Container Popular Council. Brief agreed description with the importance and particular dimensions of the accident and their characteristics.

Figure 3: Visualization of Hydrological accident names using protgs plugging Jambalaya.

The Hydrological accident names classification is divided in 12 subclasses (Figure 3) grouping 619 instances. 3.3 Inhabited Places Names

The definition of an inhabited place name contains the following properties: Complete name. Population category. Popular Council where it belongs. Geographical coordinates. Economic activity. Communication Routes.

Figure 4: Visualization of inhabited place names using protgs Jambalaya plugging.

The Inhabited place names classification is divided in 7 subclasses (Figure 4) grouping 1267 instances. 3.4 Relief accident names

The definition of a Relief accident name contains the following properties: Complete name. Location according to great units and subunits of the relief. Geographical coordinates. Popular Council where it belongs. Brief geographic, physical and economic description. Length (if is considered as significant data). Altitude above sea level.

Figure 5: Visualization of Inhabited place names using protgs Jambalaya plugging.

Inhabited place names classification is divided in 34 classes (Figure 5) grouping 954 instances. 3.5 Resultant ontology

Although the ontology building field the main result of this work is the resultant ontology (Figure 6) exist some collateral goals that also constitute results. One of the fundamental elements is the creation of a filter ontology based on the OGC filter encoding specification (Vretanos, 2001). Also was created an ontology for the terms related to limits used as spatial reference in the geographic names ontology. None upper ontology is used in this ontology ignoring initially some methodologies and, in the future, will be necessary to evaluate some of the existing ones to obtain interoperability between different SDI.
Figure 6: Visualization of the of the ontology first inheritance level using protgs Jambalaya plugging.

The application of the ontology defines its content and development (Noy, and others, 2001). This ontology was created to be used in an SDI with geospatial services that will provide the cartography with geographic names. This ontology is not finished and its use in the CYTED project will define its future development in a way that is needed to respond new questions of competition. The future work will be projected to develop a Geographic Names Dictionary based on this ontology that allows to its evaluation and development. This application will be based on the SDI model proposed in the reference terms of CYTED project.

GEOSPATIAL SEMANTIC WEB DICCIONARY

In (Capote, Rafael, & Gonzlez, 2009) is evaluated the correspondence between SDI and Semantic Web technologies and we can see that in a SDI framework can be developed a Semantic Web application. The authors analysis is based on a Semantic Web framework consisting in a Semantic Framework and a Semantic Services to allow the interaction with it. (Kolas, Hebeler, & Dean, 2005) 4.1 The Semantic Framework Services

An infrastructure of Semantic Services for an IDE must provide the tools to support and to use the knowledge base that conform his semantic framework (Lemmens, 2007). To achieve this target there has been conceived this infrastructure formed by three fundamental modules: The Semantic Administration services. The Semantic Processing services. The Semantic User Interaction services.

These services keep a strong internal interaction in order to be able to execute its functions. In this application two services are considered; The Semantic Processing and the User Interaction services. 4.2 The Application prototype

One of the most important services is the user query processing service. This service has the function of, using some iterations, to refine and to structure a user's consultation up to obtaining an expression in XML language where all its elements are defined in the Semantic Frame of the IDE. This expression must be suitable for automatic translation in a process flow BPEL (Jordan & Evdemon, 2007) to be executed by the semantic services of prosecution.

Figure 7: translation process from a user query to a BPEL process.

CONCLUSIONS

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