ABSTRACT

Ontologies are increasingly being developed and used within geographic information science and other related study areas to provide a means of more effective data integration between heterogeneous data sets. Most ontology research concerns the development of fully formal, computer-readable representations. This chapter presents a novel approach that puts the domain expert at the forefront of the development process. A method is described that enables domain experts to develop semiformal ontologies. These are more structured and less ambiguous than natural language; can be transformed into a formal, computer-readable representation; and, most important, are simple to understand and create by nonontology experts. Ontologies created by domain experts are evaluated against those created by an ontology expert. The

results demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully be implemented by domain experts to create viable semiformal ontologies.