Semantic Integration of Authoritative and Volunteered Geographic Information using Ontologies

VGI projects such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) have grown in the past few years, resulting in more accurate, complete and up-to-date datasets. As a result, governments are now interested in VGI as a reliable source of information. Integrating geographic information requires solving semantic heterogeneity in a way that allows the identification of features in different datasets representing the same real phenomena. We present a method for identifying sets of homologous features in authoritative and VGI datasets. First, a domain ontology is used as a common knowledge among datasets. Second, direct mapping from the datasets to the domain ontology is done, resulting in new datasets using the same vocabulary and therefore, interoperable.