Fuzzy spatial web services for integrating geo-spatial information from heterogeneous repositories

Abstract

Geospatial data has become an integral part of many decision making processes specially related to socioeconomic development. The geospatial information are often stored, maintained and processed by various diverse organizations in their proprietary Geospatial Information System (GIS). The major bottlenecks of integrating these diverse datasets lie in the understanding of individual data structures or models, interrelationships among the data and the accessibility of the repositories over web. The standardization of these data models will help in proper integration of the diverse database structures and thus facilitates user query resolution. In addition, information imprecision and uncertainty exists in many real world applications. Current standards proposed for modeling geospatial data are unable to represent and process fuzzy information. In this work, a framework has been proposed, that integrates the heterogeneous spatial datasets from various organizations using fuzzy spatial web services. The initial step of the process is fuzzy spatial data modeling, that captures the uncertain properties of the spatial data. The issue of interoperability (structural and syntactic) and fuzziness is addressed through fuzzy GML (Geographic Markup Language) a standard for data representation and exchange over the Web.