Creating of topographic and city ontologies for educational buildings

The use of spatial information in the semantic web has become an important research topic in recent years. Current technologies have provided vast opportunities to link many distributed and autonomous information sources (e.g. relational databases, legacy systems etc.) to many information receivers (e.g. applications, users etc.). This link provides mainly for physical interoperability. But there are various difficulties for semantic interoperability. Semantic interoperability means that sources and receivers can exchange information in a meaningful way. Providing semantic interoperability is difficult when sources and receivers have different contexts. The Semantic Web will be possible once levels of interoperability have been established. Ontologies have been acknowledged to be the core methodology for capturing, reuse and sharing semantics of geospatial information. To support the sharing and reuse of knowledge among systems, it is important to define the common vocabulary. In this thesis study, it is aimed that ontological modeling for the conceptualization of same real world phenomena with different points of view. In this context, first interoperability problems were examined and discussed. Then the concept of semantic and geospatial semantic web were examined. Then being the key of semantic web and interoperability, ontologies were investigated. Then the importance of ontologies and using ontologies in the same platform from different sources were examined for levels of heterogeneity. Finally, two examples of ontologies (i.e. topographic and thematic/city) were developed by using Protégé software. Semantic differences of this ontologies and their impact on interoperability were discussed.