Conservation GIS: Ontology and spatial reasoning for commonsense knowledge.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Geographic information available from multiple sources are moving beyond their local context and widening the semantic difference. The major challenge emerged with ubiquity of geographic information, evolving geospatial technology and location-aware service is to deal with the semantic interoperability. Although the use of ontology aims at capturing shared conceptualization of geospatial information, human perception of world view is not adequately addressed in geospatial ontology. This study proposes ‘Conservation GIS Ontology’ that comprises spatial knowledge of non-expert conservationists in the context of Chitwan National Park, Nepal. The discussion is presented in four parts: exploration of commonsense spatial knowledge about conservation; development of conceptual ontology to conceptualize domain knowledge; formal representation of conceptualization in Web Ontology Language (OWL); and quality assessment of the ontology development tasks. Elicitation of commonsense spatial knowledge is performed with the notion of cognitive view of semantic. Emphasis is given to investigate the observation of wildlife movement and habitat change scenarios. Conceptualization is carried out by providing the foundation of the top-level ontology- ‘DOLCE’ and geospatial ontologies. Protégé 4.1 ontology editor is employed for ontology engineering tasks. Quality assessment is accomplished based on the intrinsic approach of ontology evaluation.(...)