Geosemantic Information Retrieval Using a Geoontology

Currently, most users prefer searching for the information using the more convenient and dynamic mobile information retrieval services to using the existing desktop PC services in the limited space, according as a lot of mobile terminals have been provided with the development of a variety of techniques. Information retrieval service using the mobile terminals has the strength that provides the personalized information results related to the users’ information request anytime and anywhere, considering the users’ mobility and portability. Therefore, for the information retrieval using the mobile devices I need the context awareness techniques which have been researched actively. In this thesis, I developed the context awareness ontology model for Geotourism as the representative method of the context awareness techniques to predict the user’s interest and foresee the information about which retrieval results and which places the user want to get.

The proposed Geotour ontology model is extended and designed from W3C Time Ontology defined in the international standards and spatial geometry feature ontology supported by OGC GeoSPARQL, so it can provide the usability and the function.

That is, GeotourFeature class is the subclass of ogc:Feature defined in OGC as in Figure 1. GeotourTime class which is for expressing temporal information of a certain Geotour features is the subclass of TemporalThing of W3C.

Figure 1: Relationship between the international standard ontology and the geotour ontology model

A Geotour features and a geotour map describes a part of ontology to represent the GeotourFeature composed of GeotourTime class and GeotourLocation class. The highest class to represent GeotourTime and GeotourLocation is GeotourFeature class. As mentioned in the previous section, our model inherited the temporal ontology of W3C. Figure 2 describes a part of ontology to represent the GeotourFeature composed of GeotourTime class and GeotourLocation class. The highest class to represent GeotourTime and GeotourLocation is GeotourFeature class.

Figure 2: Top level classes of geotour ontology