GEO-MAD: Geographic Ontology for Major Disasters

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Geographic Ontologies The term “Ontology” was employed with different senses in a number a fields; it was originally derived from the philosophy where an ontology is “a systematic account of Existence”. Ontology was initially introduced in Artificial Intelligence field by Gruber [2] as “an explicit specification of a conceptualization”. Uschold et Gruninger [3] give further clarification about the word conceptualization in the above definition “Ontology is the term used to refer to the shared understanding of some domain of interest which may be used as a unifying framework (…). An ontology necessarily entails or embodies some sort of world view with respect to a given domain. The world view is often conceived as a set of concepts (e.g. entities, attributes, and processes), their definitions and their inter-relationships; this is referred to as a conceptualisation. Such a conceptualisation may be implicit, e.g. existing only in someone's head, or embodied in a piece of software. The word `ontology' is sometimes used to refer to this implicit conceptualisation. However, the more standard usage and that which we will adopt is that the ontology is an explicit account or representation of a conceptualisation”. Alberts [4] brings in the notion of taxonomy in ontologies: “An ontology for a body of knowledge concerning a particular task or domain describes a taxonomy of concepts for that task or domain that define the semantic interpretation of the knowledge”. Whereas Guarino [5] introduces the logical theory in ontologies: “An ontology is a logical theory that constrains the intended models of a logical language”, since they must be as formal as possible, a logical formalism is often used to represent ontologies, e.g. descripti... ... middle of paper ... ...ok/Briassoulis/contents.htm. , 1999. [11] M. Wolman, "Criteria for land use," Resources and world development. New York: John Wiley, pp. 643-657, 1987. [12] J. R. Anderson, A land use and land cover classification system for use with remote sensor data vol. 964: US Government Printing Office, 1976. [13] T. Pierce et J. Thie, "Land inventories for land use planning in Canada," Planning Future Land Uses, pp. 57-71, 1981. [14] Y. Heymann, CORINE land cover: Technical guide: European Commission, Directorate-General, Environment, Nuclear Safety and Civil Protection, 1994. [15] C. P. Giri, Remote Sensing of Land Use and Land Cover: Principles and Applications: Taylor & Francis, 2012. [16] A. Di Gregorio et L. J. Jansen, Land cover classification system: LCCS: classification concepts and user manual: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Rome, 2000.

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