Framework research of semantic sharing and interoperability of geospatial information

Abstract

Knowledge sharing and semantic interoperability is a significant research theme in Geographical Information Science (GIScience) because many researchers believe that semantic heterogeneity has been identified as the main obstacle for GIScience development. Interoperability issues can exist at three levels: syntactic, structural (also called systemic) and semantic. The former two, however, can be achieved by implementing international or domain standards proposed by several organizations, for example, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the International Organization for Standardization/Technical Committee for Geographic information/Geomatics (ISO/TC 211). In this paper, we are concentrating on semantic interoperability, which is the sort of topic that halt conversations and cause people's eyes to glaze over, from two aspects: data/information/knowledge and operation/processing. We presented a service-centered architecture for semantic interoperability of geospatial data and processes. OGC standards like Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Map Service (WMS) have been employed as normative interfaces for analyzing requests, division requests and delivering small requests. Ontology has been introduced to describe distributed resource including various data and geo-processing operations. The role of interoperability, especially from semantic perspective, has been distinguished at the first section in this paper. As a fundamental principal, the following section introduces semantic web, web service and other related works at this orientation. We present our service-based architecture in detail and its simple application at part three. Conclusion and further orientations have been illustrated at last section.