ONTOLOGY BASED APPROACH FOR GEOSPATIAL SEMANTIC WEB TRAN Thai Binh 1 , Thilo WEHRMANN 1 , Steffen GEBHARDT 2 , Verena KLINGER 1 , Juliane HUTH 2 , VO Quoc Tuan 3 , Claudia KUENZER 1 1 German Aerospace Center, German Remote Sensing Data Center, Muenchner Strasse 20, 82234 Wessling 2 Department of Remote Sensing, University of Wuerzburg, Germany, Hubland, 97074 Wuerzburg, Germany 3 Department of Land Resources, College of the Environment and Natural Resources, Can Tho University binh.tranthai@dlr.de/ ttbinh@vast-hcm.ac.vn ; thilo.wehrmann@dlr.de ; steffen.gebhardt@dlr.de ; verena.klinger@dlr.de ; juliane.huth@dlr.de ; vqtuan@ctu.edu.vn ; claudia.kuenzer@dlr.de KEY WORDS: Semantic web, geospatial semantic web, ontology ABSTRACT: Semantic web facilitates a new generation of web applications. It has been applied in many fields so far, e.g. for medicine, bioinformatics, social web. Up to now, the semantic web is well known as an effective infrastructure to enhance visibility of knowledge on the web. It provides a common interoperable framework in which information is given a well-defined meaning such that data and application can be used by machines (e.g. reasoning) for more effective discovery, automation, integration and reuse across various application, enterprise and community boundaries. The semantic web is based upon an ontology approach. However, in the field of geospatial domain, the ontology approach for web application is not very popular. In this paper, we first briefly present the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Schema (RDFS) as a metadata model for conceptual description or modelling of information that is implemented in web resources as also Web Ontology Language (OWL) for authoring ontologies which is the primarily supported language for semantic web, and then review the recent ontology approach in the geospatial domain. We will discuss about the lack of efficient ways to find user requested, suitable information in a data warehouse system. Based on the discussion, we will present an ontology based approach for a water-related information system. Our approach aims to provide an intelligent information query tool based on different applications/purposes. The proposed system will provide information appropriate to the user requirements with less or non prior knowledge of the underlying data. 1. INTRODUCTION Since it was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web (WWW) has dramatically grown. With a modest amount from the beginning, WWW consists of billions websites nowadays becoming a very huge and heterogeneous data warehouse. As a result, searching for particular information becomes more difficult. User always faces the problem that searching result is not reasonable or does not relate to the keyword query [12]. A growing number of individuals and groups from academia and industry have been evolving the Web into another level - the Semantic Web [3]. It is “a web of data that can be processed directly or indirectly by machine” [2] and brings a higher degree of automation in exploiting data in a meaningful way. Semantic web facilitates a new generation of web applications. It has been applied in many fields so far, e.g. for medicine, bioinformatics, social web. Up to now, the semantic web is well known as an effective infrastructure to enhance visibility of knowledge on the web. It provides a common interoperable framework in which information is given a well- defined meaning such that data and application can be used by machines (e.g. reasoning) for more effective discovery, automation, integration and reuse across various applications, enterprises and community boundaries. Ontology is applied because it constitutes formal and explicit specification of shared conceptualization of the domain [8]. In parallel with the development of the Semantic Web, the Geospatial Semantic Web is initiated recently. It was identified as an immediately considered research priority for many research groups as UCGIS (University Consortium for Geospatial Information Science) [5] and OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium).