From expert knowledge to formal ontologies for semantic interpretation of the urban environment from satellite images

Issue title: Selected papers of KES2012 - Part 1 of 2

Guest editors: M. Graña, A.I. Gonzalez-Acuña and C. Zanni-Merk

Article type: Research Article

Authors: de Bertrand de Beuvron, François^{a; *} | Marc-Zwecker, Stella^a | Puissant, Anne^b | Zanni-Merk, Cecilia^a

Affiliations: [a] ICUBE, BFO Team, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France | [b] Environment Laboratory, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France | Computational Intelligence Group, University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Spain

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: François de Bertrand de Beuvron, ICUBE (UMR CNRS 7357), BFO Team, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France. E-mail: debeuvron@unistra.fr

Abstract: The widespread introduction of satellite imagery with several spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions is a real opportunity to analyze and characterize the urban environment. These last few years, the Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) approach has been largely developed and applied for urban applications. However, a major issue in this approach is domain knowledge formalization and exploitation. In this paper, after a detailed presentation of related works in the domain of semantic interpretation using ontologies, a taxonomy of urban objects and a framework to describe urban objects and their spatial organization is presented. This taxonomy is then formalized in a domain ontology using the semantic web ontology language and rules (OWL and SWRL).

Keywords: Urban environment, satellite imagery, ontology, semantic interpretation, OWL, SWRL

DOI: 10.3233/KES-130264

Journal: International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 55-65, 2013