Combining ontologies to automatically generate temporal perspectives of geospatial domains

This paper describes an approach for automatically combining geospatial and temporal ontologies such that a geospatial domain can be analyzed over multiple temporal granularities. Terms from a geospatial ontology are combined with terms from a temporal ontology to form cross products that provide an integrated spatiotemporal framework. This framework is multi-granular, highlighting elements from the geospatial ontology at different domain times. We show how pairs of ontologies represented in Protégé can be used as the input for deriving cross products and how the results of this technique can be used as a basis for querying and retrieving new perspectives on geospatial domains. Visualizations of cross product spaces highlight the geospatial–temporal combinations of terms as well as the different relations that link these terms and improve the understanding of the structure of the spatiotemporal framework. Methods for filtering terms from the cross products are also investigated in order to prune the resulting frameworks and remove irrelevant or unnecessary terms.