Towards a Semantic Representation of Raster Spatial Data

In this work, a methodology to semantically describe spatial objects within a Raster Spatial Data Set is outlined. This approach attempts to describe the objects contained in the raster data. For example, in Digital Elevation Models (DEM), as case study, we propose to find out landforms contained in the model, giving a description like "In this model there is a mountain having a maximum altitude of 302 meters and located between 19.09383 degrees N and 99.855410 degrees W; also there is a plateau having...". This methodology consists of three stages: conceptualization for describing the domain of knowledge to be represented; synthesis for extracting objects from spatial data; and description for representing the objects found in the knowledge domain. The work is focused on establishing the guidelines to semantically process raster spatial data, according to the properties, relationships and concepts involved in the context of the landforms for DEMs.