Improving geodatabase semantic querying exploiting ontologies

Geospatial semantic querying to geographical databases has been recognized as an hot topic in GIS research. Most approaches propose to adopt an ontology as a knowledge representation structure on top of the database, representing the concepts the user can query. These concepts are typically directly mapped to database tables. In this paper we propose a methodology where the ontology is further exploited mapping axioms to spatial SQL queries. The main advantage of this approach is that semantic-rich geospatial queries can be abstractly represented in the ontology and can be automatically translated into spatial SQL queries.