A SERVICE-ORIENTED APPROACH FOR INTEGRATING HETEROGENEOUS SPATIAL DATA SOURCES REALIZATION OF A VIRTUAL GEO-DATA REPOSITORY

Abstract

Searching and accessing geospatial information in the open and distributed environments of geospatial information systems poses several challenges due to the heterogeneity in geospatial data. Geospatial data is highly heterogeneous — both at the syntactic and semantic level. The requirement for an integration architecture for seamless access of geospatial data has been raised over the past decades. The paper proposes a service-based model for geospatial integration where each geospatial data provider is interfaced on the web as services. The interface for these services has been described with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specified service standards. Catalog service provides service descriptions for the services to be discovered. The semantic of each service description is captured in the form of ontology. The similarity assessment method of request service with candidate services proposed in this paper is aimed at resolving the heterogeneity in semantics of locational terms of service descriptions. In a way, we have proposed an architecture for enterprise geographic information system (E-GIS), which is an organization-wide approach to GIS integration, operation, and management. A query processing mechanism for accessing geospatial information in the service-based distributed environment has also been discussed with the help of a case study.