Research On Cadastral Domain Ontology And Its Application In Land Registration System

Cadastre is the first form of land management. The most important role of cadastre is providing integrity, accuracy and latest land information for the implementation of various measures of land management. Modern cadastre is the basis of land management work. Cadastral system is realized by national cadastral management measures. The research contents of cadastre include the disciplines of identification and change of cadastral elements, i.e. land property rights, boundary, quantities, quality and land use in the development of cadastre books. In the process of construction of electronic cadastre, due to the lack of uniform standards, in fact, it has become the "information island". This thesis tries to introduce ontological theory into cadastral domain to build cadastral domain ontology. The cadastral domain ontology can clarify the structure of domain knowledge, provide the basis for knowledge sharing and resolve the problems mentioned ahead. At the same time, the cadastral domain ontology provides new ideas for integrity and accuracy checking of cadastral data; it can provide faster and more accurate publicly cadastral information retrieve services, promote the development of domain knowledge discovery and data mining, and speed up the integration between disciplines. The main work of this thesis includes two points, as follows:(1) Firstly, this thesis summarizes the relevant theory of ontology, such as:the concept of ontology, the Principles and methods and tools of Ontology Construction, the ontology languages. And the institutions about cadastre are concluded, mainly including:land property system, land transaction system and land registration system, which are the theoretical foundation of cadastral domain ontology construction. According to Searle’s institutional reality theory, the cadastral phenomena are as part of institutional reality. It must be from physical reality and institutional reality to analysis the cadastral phenomena. Bittner has made the analysis of the reality in the cadastre based on Frank’s five tiers of ontology. Based on his research, this thesis makes the definition of cadastral process.(2) The core task of this thesis is to build a cadastral domain ontology which is based on Chinese cadastral institutions and the analysis of reality in cadastre. From the perspective of ontological categories, Bittner thought that the ontology of cadastre should include subjects, objects and events. And Frank believed that the ladder of cadastral ontology is concepts, processes and judgments. Inspired by this, this thesis provides that the cadastral domain ontology should consist four parts:concept ontology, process ontology, time ontology and spatial ontology. The concept ontology describes the nominal concepts and analyses the categories, the levels and the relationships of nominal concepts. Concept ontology is to describe the concepts of cadastral field based on Core Cadastral Domain Model, and has five categories of objects:person, land, right, document and entity. Cadastre has the legal character. It is the important tool of land management. And the core of cadastre is rights on land. This thesis builds the legal cadastral domain model of china by introducing the land property bunch of china into the Core Cadastral Domain Model. Based on legal cadastral domain model, the concepts about rights are described. The cadastral process can be divided into three kinds:social process, cadastral system process and cadastral work process. Theoretically speaking, social process must cause the happen of cadastral system process which is the requirement of consistency of cadastre. After the social process, the achievement of cadastral system process needs the cadastral work process. The social process and the cadastral work process are the external processes to cadastral system process. Process ontology is used to describe the processes of cadastral domain based on the definitions of cadastre process defined by thesis. The relationship between cadastral processes is discussed. This thesis constructs the process ontology levels by talking about the relations between process and cadastral changes. The cadastral work process is represented in OWL-S service model. Time ontology and spatial ontology is used to describe the temporal entities and spatial entities in cadastral domain. In the cadastre, if the temporal relationship and the spatial relationship are described respectively, only the latest cadastral data can be described but the history and temporal states of parcels can not be described. Based on the theories of temporal and spatial relationship, this thesis discusses the ontological description of temporal and spatial relationship of cadastral entities.Finally, this thesis designs a land registration system based on the cadastral domain model. Cadastral domain model clears up the knowledge structure of cadastral domain and provides the basis for the knowledge share and interoperability of information. The process ontology can promote the reuse of process. And the cadastral domain model can serve the cadastral information service, knowledge excavation, cadastral data check and discipline integration. This thesis designs three tests for the use of cadastral domain model:assistant service based on concept ontology, cadastral process control based on process ontology and data check based on spatial ontology.