A review of spatial ontologies for urban and architectural heritage domain

Abstract

This paper aims to report a review in the past literature about computer science ontologies, with a special view on the ones connected to the spatial domain of urban data and built heritage. From a general point of view the paper offer a write up of definitions, classifications and design approaches and methods for ontologies as they have emerged since the nineties and evolved in the last two decades.
In the built heritage domain, the interest, need of knowledge and the use of ontologies has grown to face the wide exchange of digital spatial data and the extensive adoption of spatial data infrastructures, which faced problems related in the general sense to the interoperability among spatial databases, and specifically the integration of geographical and urban databases involving the adoption of standards