Using semantic Wikis as collaborative tools for geo-ontology

As ontology has become a convenient vehicle for domain knowledge and metadata, it is used for realizing information sharing at semantic level in geoscience. Building geo-ontology is a systematic engineering and requires collaborative work, while there is a lack of ontology edit tools supporting collaborative work. Since Wikis are cooperative tools for easy writing and sharing of content and semantic Wikis are the Wikis improved with Semantic Web for representing semantic information, we propose to use semantic Wikis as cooperative tools for building geo-ontology. An architecture similar as semantic Wiki for geo-ontology editing is presented. As well as the semantic hierarchy of geo-information and the evolvement mechanism of geo-ontology in it are presented. The usefulness of the approach is demonstrated by a small case study.