A flexible integration framework for a Semantic Geospatial Web application

Abstract

With the growth of the World Wide Web technologies, the access to and use of geospatial information changed in the past decade radically. Previously, the data processed by a GIS as well as its methods had resided locally and contained information that was sufficiently unambiguous in the respective information community. Now, both data and methods may be retrieved and combined from anywhere in the world, escaping their local contexts. The last few years have seen a growing interest in the field of semantic geospatial web. With the development of semantic web technologies, we have seen the possibility of solving the heterogeneity/interoperation problem in the GIS community. The semantic geospatial web application can support a wide variety of tasks including data integration, interoperability, knowledge reuse, spatial reasoning and many others. This paper proposes a flexible framework called GeoSWF (short for Geospatial Semantic Web Framework), which supports the semantic integration of the distributed and heterogeneous geospatial information resources and also supports the semantic query and spatial relationship reasoning. We design the architecture of GeoSWF by extending the MVC Pattern. The GeoSWF use the geo-2007.owl proposed by W3C as the reference ontology of the geospatial information and design different application ontologies according to the situation of heterogeneous geospatial information resources. A Geospatial Ontology Creating Algorithm (GOCA) is designed for convert the geospatial information to the ontology instances represented by RDF/OWL. On the top of these ontology instances, the GeoSWF carry out the semantic reasoning by the rule set stored in the knowledge base to generate new system query. The query result will be ranking by ordering the Euclidean distance of each ontology instances. At last, the paper gives the conclusion and future work.