Ordnance Survey Ontologies

The goal of Ordnance Survey’s GeoSemantics team is to provide both an explicit representation of our organisation's knowledge and a set of increasingly automated operations that allow different datasets to be combined together, by representing them in a semantically meaningful way via ontologies. Ontologies contain a set of knowledge about a domain, such as topography.

We are building a Topographic ontology, a staged process where we are building ontologies of the sub-domains within topography. These are updated as we learn more about ontology authoring, so the latest versions can be found here, while previous versions are still available for backwards compatability. So far we have built ontologies describing Hydrology, Buildings and Places, along with modules that contain terms in common.

The conceptual ontology is the human readable ontology, (written in the Ordnance Survey "Rabbit" controlled English language) while the OWL-DL ontology is the logical, machine readable version. Each Ordnance Survey ontology has been created according to Ordnance Survey's Conceptual ontology authoring method and Logical ontology authoring method.

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