Nigeria Geography Ontology for Semantic Web Applications

Abstract

Semantic Web was introduced to overcome the challenges of the current Search engines where retrieval process is based on traditional keyword search. Retrieval based on traditional keyword search lacks semantics and as a result, a lot of irrelevant results are returned. In Semantic Web, the retrieval process is based on semantic which returned more precise and relevant results. The main building block of Semantic Web is the ontology. Therefore ontology is needed to build Semantic Web retrieval application. There are various ontologies developed on different domains in recent years. However, in Ontology development process, each domain has its own peculiar challenges. In this paper, Nigerian Geography Ontology was developed. The developed ontology is used to build a Nigerian Geography knowledge-base which can be used for the development various Semantic Web applications related to Nigerian Geography.