Abstract:

Searching for precise information contained in large textual files is very time consuming and error prone. Investigating past and historical data concerning geography and economy can be facilitated a lot when the data is appropriately stored in a data base or and the corresponding schema has a proper form. Therefore, it is convenient to transform textual data to an ontology and query it in such a form. Some research has been done on the application software engineering methods for construction of ontologies. Ontologies constructed in this way need a proper querying counterpart.

In this paper, the usefulness the problem of querying of geographic and economic information from a object-oriented data base is studied. The querying language is Object Constraint Language (OCL) and software engineering techniques are applied. OCL allows one to query information stored in oo-database which schemata expressed by UML class diagrams. An evaluation of the method shows that it is very powerful and allows for very fine querying. The querying is facilitated by the fact that considered UNL ontology is close to the reality. However, the queries tend to be complicated and an inexperienced user of OCL may have problems with formulating them. This research may help in assessing regional development, qualitative and structural changes in the regional economy, assessing ownership, infrastructure and living standard transformation.