This repository contains the documentation of the Ontology Of LandmaRks (OOR). It is a lightweight ontology of landmarks describing landmark types in mountainous area.

Documentation site: landmark-ontology

Landmarks in geographic databases are represented by their name (when available), type, and geometry. To address the heterogeneity of landmark types found in both spoken language and existing geographic databases, and to provide a formal definition suitable for applications such as victim localization, route planning, and wayfinding, this work aims to establish a controlled vocabulary for landmarks. In this research, we present a lightweight ontology (i.e. ontology having generally less complexity and does not express formal constraints) of landmarks, named Ontology of LandmaRks (OOR), describing landmark types. In this version (V1.0.1) it is an application ontology, i.e. it is designed to support mountain rescue operations. The ontology construction is adapted from the SAMOD methodology for engineering ontology development and involves researchers and experts from mountain rescue teams. The construction of OOR is composed of four main phases: knowledge acquisition, conceptual formalisation, implementation, and testing. The implementation phase is carried out by an iterative and collaborative approach and using four formalised sources of knowledge (a landmark and a landform ontologies, and two other domain vocabularies), an un-formalised taxonomy of outdoor activities, and five authoritative and volunteered geographic information sources representing geographic data.

The ontology was described in the paper Olteanu-Raimond, A.-M., Bunel, M., Dominguès, C., Duchêne, C., Jolivet, L., Mustière, S., Van Damme, M.-D., Favre, O., and Gendner, V.: A lightweight ontology for landmarks to assist rescue in mountainous areas, Adv. Cartogr. GIScience Int. Cartogr. Assoc., 4, 15, https://doi.org/10.5194/ica-adv-4-15-2023, 2023.

This work was supported by the ANR research project CHOUCAS (ANR-16-CE23-0018).