An algorithm to enhance queries over a geodatabase

Geospatial semantic querying to spatial databases has been recognized as a hot topic in GIS research, although no standardized approaches have been proposed so far. However, a common solution is to adopt an ontology as a knowledge representation structure on top of a spatial database to support user queries. In this context, we propose an approach to build an ontology which, not only represents the concepts stored in the database and their semantic abstractions, but it is also capable of managing the defined specializations of such concepts. The methodology introduced in this paper aims at building this richer ontology and the associated materialized views to handle the semantic query translation.