A mapping ontology for geographic information retrieval

The Semantic Web technologies, especially ontologies are used for applications representation and knowledge management. In this paper we focus on the presentation of the map in ontological form and the use of the mapping ontology to serve the user query. The proposed approach consists of two parts; the first part is the construction of ontology representing the components of the map where an instance represents an entire map. The second part represents an information retrieval system by exploiting the ontology previously constructed through the use of SPARQL queries. The proposed approach is validated through a prototype exploiting a set of tools (Microsoft Expression Web, PHP, SPaRQL,...) as an adaptation of a classic architecture of Web application.