Ontology for real estate cadastre

Standardisation efforts in the geospatial domain, provided by ISO TC 211 and OpenGIS Consortium, have brought many specifications and standards that define structure and encoding rules of data and interfaces of services. These standards provide syntactic interoperability of geospatial data and services, while neglecting their semantics. In order to achieve semantic interoperability, i.e. explicitly define the meaning of data and services to make them understandable both to machines and humans, there are attempts to develop Geospatial Semantic Web, where semantics of data will be expressed explicitly and formally. An important part of this process is the development of domain ontologies, i.e. a common vocabulary in some domain. In order to bring semantics into cadastral systems, it is necessary to develop ontology for real estate cadastre. Therefore, the authors propose the ontology based knowledge model in the field of real estate cadastre based on ISO 19152 international standard and other geospatial standards, as a core ontology for cadastre on top of which a domain ontology for a specific country should be built. The domain ontology presented in this paper refers to the real estate cadastre of Serbia, but a similar approach can be adopted for different cadastral organisations in other countries. In this way, different domain ontologies based on various cadastral organisations will conform to the same standard based core ontology that will provide a basis for the semantic search and integration of cadastral data on national and international level.