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

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).