An Ontology Based Prototype for Geocoding Offset Addresses

This paper explores the use of ontology based methods to determine the geographic locations of Chinese offset addresses. Offset addresses are those addresses which contain a natural language location description reference to another location. The study has two parts, 1) the definition of a geo-spatial ontology for Chinese addresses, and 2) the design of spatial computation rules to enable spatial reasoning and location computation. Web Ontology Language(OWL) is used in the first part to describe domain concepts, relationship between them. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used in the second part to describe the rules that enable the process of spatial computation and reasoning. The computed result after reasoning can be saved to the knowledge base and employed as new knowledge. A prototype is built to verify the model and the algorithm. The results demonstrate the feasibility of approach. They also revealed potential problems for spatial computations based on ontology.