Abstract
The paper compares hydrographic and terrain categories in the geospatial data
standards of the US, Taiwan, and Russian Federation where the dominant
languages used are from different language families. It aims to identify structural and semantic differences between similar categories across three geospatial
data standards. By formalizing the data standard structures and identifying the
properties that differentiate sibling categories in each geospatial data standard
using well-known formal relations and quality universals, we develop a common
basis on which hydrographic and terrain categories in the three data standards
can be compared. The result suggests that all three data standards structure
categories with a mixture of relations with different meaning even though most
of them are well-known relations in top-level ontologies. Similar categories can
be found across all three standards but exact match between similar categories
are rare.
