Abstract: With the launched satellite and its onboard ICESAT space-based laser altimeter systems GLAS in United States in 2003, the study of polar ice sheets via the data intensively collection is valuable and important in order to achieve mass balance of ice sheets, earth’s gravity field change and the level of rising global sea, etc. The paper uses geo-ontology which is developed from philosophy and information science technology to analyze the change of polar sheets and to provide the intelligent access services. At the same time, ontology intelligent optimization and semantic query expansion are discussed based on constructing geographic knowledge database. The research shows that it is feasible to retrieve the change of polar sheets with the application of geography ontology.

Key words: geography ontology, GALS, intelligent query