Transforming Geospatial Ontologies by Homomorphisms
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In this paper, we study the (geospatial) ontologies we are interested in together as an ontology (a geospatial ontology) system, consisting of a set of the (geospatial) ontologies and a set of ontology operations. A homomorphism between two ontology systems is a function between two sets of ontologies, which preserves these ontology operations. We view clustering a set of the ontologies we are interested in as partitioning the set or defining an equivalence relation on the set or forming a quotient set of the set or obtaining the surjective image of the set. Each ontology system homomorphism can be factored as a surjective clustering to a quotient space, followed by an embedding. Ontology (merging) systems, natural partial orders on the systems, and ontology merging closures in the systems are then transformed under ontology system homomorphisms, given by quotients and embeddings.
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