Towards a Geographic Ontology Reference Model for Matching Purposes

Ontologies and geographic ontologies are becoming important re- search and application fields for the geographic information systems (GIS) community. Although geographic ontologies (also known as spatial-temporal ontologies, geo-ontologies or geospatial ontologies) are becoming popular, a standard and complete model is still missing. The attempts for establishing standards are yet incipient, i.e., do not fulfill the actual needs. In this paper we propose a reference model for developing geographic ontologies, with the spe- cific purpose of matching. The main idea is to extend the model for conventional, non-geographic, ontologies to make it suitable for describing the particularities of the GIS data and the relationships among them.