Abstract—Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have
become widely used for capturing, storing, integrating, analyzing
and displaying various types of geospatial data. They have been
applied to several fields such as transportation, education,
business, tourism, urban planning, etc. Nowadays, with the
advancement of GIS technological tools in capturing and storing
geographic data, it leads to the challenge in managing data from
diverse sources and storing in different formats at different levels
of detail. In another word, two or more applications sharing data
that represent the same thing may cause different types of
heterogeneity problems. To enable GIS interoperability and data
management, ontologies which are considered as powerful tools
for information sharing, information processing and information
integration are utilized in this context. This paper discusses how
ontologies can be employed to resolve heterogeneities in order to
enhance interoperability and support geospatial data sharing and
reuse as well as facilitate decision making in GIS domain