This paper introduces a geographic information system architecture based on ontologies. Ontology plays a central role in the definition of all aspects and components of an information system in the so-called ontology-driven information systems. The system presented here uses a container of interoperable geographic objects. The objects are extracted from multiple independent data sources and are derived from a strongly typed mapping of classes from multiple ontologies. This approach provides a great level of interoperability and allows partial integration of information when completeness is impossible.

Context plays a key role, as recongnized by a wide body of research, in application and entity adaptation in the ubiquitous computing world characterized by extensive platform heterogenity and environment dynamicity and unpredictability. Implicit in the notion of context, as used by context-aware applications, is the actual effects, including constraints, context has on target entities. We believe that making a step further from explicit reasoning about context to explicit reasoning about its implicit effects will facilitate more effective and flexible adaptation. In this work we present an approach to modeling the world based on natural notions of container and containment and show how it enables explicit reasoning about and acting upon context-implied effects on target entities, data objects in particular. We also outline a practical use of the model through its application in a system for autonomic context-aware infromation security and privacy protection. 1

The proposed approach shows a query language for a spatio-temporal world model. The language is build by binary relations close to the terms of natural language. The goal of the work is to develop a domain independent query language for a cognitive vision system. The world model assumes objects to be given by position and orientation over discrete time steps. It is shown how the world model is decomposed into sets of ”qualitatively ” equivalent facts to gain syntax and semantics of a query language.