A facet-based methodology for the construction of a large-scale geo-spatial ontology

We concentrate on geo-spatial ontologies. Our main contribution in this paper is a methodology and a minimal set of guiding principles, inspired by the faceted approach, as originally developed in library science, and a largescale ontology for Space that we have constructed following the methodology proposed. The approach we propose, centered on the fundamental notions of domain and facet, guarantees the creation of high quality ontologies in terms of
robustness, extensibility, reusability, compactness and flexibility. Taking into account the different aspects of Space, the ontology we have developed, and that we have obtained from the refinement and extension of some existing resources including GeoNames, WordNet and the Italian part of MultiWordNet, provides knowledge about places of the world, their classes, their attributes and the spatial relations between them. The construction procedure was largely automatic, with manual intervention for the critical parts. This has allowed us to obtain a very satisfactory quantitative and qualitative result.