Towards effective geographic ontology matching

The integration and matching of geographic ontologies is a field in which many efforts are being employed. There are many proposals, addressing a diversity of features, both at the concept as at the instance-level. In order to make clear the issues that are involved in the matching process, in this paper we present the formal definition of the heterogeneities that may occur when comparing two geographic ontologies. Some of the heterogeneities are common to the ones found in conventional ontologies integration, and some others are specific for the geographic field. Furthermore, we discuss some still open issues, neglected up to now, but very important to achieve good results in a real scenario.