Abstract
Nowadays, there are many geospatial information from different sources such as satellite images, aerial photographs, maps, databases and others. They provide a comprehensive description of geographic objects. However, the task to identify the geographic domain is not an easy task, because it involves a semantic processing related to inference approaches that are based on the conceptualization of a domain. These approaches allow us to understand in a similar way that human beings recognize the geographic entities and help us to avoid vagueness and uncertainty. In this paper, a methodology to perform a qualitative spatial reasoning in geospatial representations is proposed. It is based on a priori knowledge, which is explicitly formalized by means of an application ontology. The knowledge described in the ontology is assessed according to a set of labels, belonging to any geographical domain for semantic analysis and mapping those labels to matching concepts defined in the ontology. As result, a set of geographic domains ordered by their relevance is obtained, providing a general concept directly related to the input labels, simulating the way that we perceive cognitively any geographic domain in the real world.
•This work proposes an approach focused on qualitative spatial reasoning.•The research determines contextual domains from a set of geographic objects.•Conceptual frequency, relevance, and semantic genealogy algorithms.•Conceptual frameworks to represent explicitly the knowledge of any domain.•Structure and organize the semantics of the geographic context.