Geographical ontologies ready to use?

Question

Hi all,

I'm looking for an ontology containing geographical knowledge. In particular I'd like to have these types of information:

• political states / regions / cities / city areas
• geographical regions (e.g. continents, name of mountains, lakes, etc)

For example, starting from the node "New York" I'd like to be able to find parents like the New York state, the USA etc, and children like Manhattan, Bronx, etc. I couldn't find anything open-source/free to use. I know that a lot of researchers extract such information from Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any off-the-shelf packages to use. I also checked OpenStreetMap, which is great for the amount of data but doesn't seem to contain a proper geographical ontology.

Even a web service would be good!

Any hints? Mulone

Answer 1

I would suggest looking for GIS data. www.geodata.gov has many free datasets. Most States will have a GIS organization that probably has free data sets as well.

If the GIS data is stored in a shapefile (.shp) format, look for the corresponding database file (.dbf). You should be able to just open that up in Excel and extract the required data.

Good luck!

Edit

I forgot to add that since this data is probably stored in a format suitable for a relational database, perhaps you write a script that converts this into a suitable schema?

Answer 2

How about looking at the Getty institute tags - they maintain an ontology. I am not sure if they are open source and I am pretty positive they have no web service.

Another idea would be to look at Yahoo!'s WOEIDs - they are a web service and they are free to use for non-commercial purposes.

Census geography is an ontology for the US but won't get you the rest of the world. It is also not a web service.

There are some ideas for ya - hope it helps.

Answer 3

Hi Mulone,

yes, there are two notable ones around. The first one is W3C's Geospatial Vocabulary which is formalised in OWL. Furthermore,there is the GeoConcepts ontology. Hope this helps to point you into the right direction!