MAKOCI: A WEB PORTAL FOR INTEGRATING AND SHARING GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SERVICES

Chin-Te Jung,Wei-Jen Chung,Ping-Ying Tsai,Min-Fang Lien,Hong-Yang Lin,Chih-Hong Sun,Chih-Shyang Chang

doi:10.24057/2071-9388-2013-6-1-71-80

Abstract

The lack of integration and communication of various geographic information services (GI services) has resulted in many duplication collection of earth observation data, and challenges of semantic interoperability. This paper proposes an ontology-based multi-agents platform, called MAKOCI (multi-agent knowledge oriented cyberinfrastructure), which acts as GI service one stop to manage, publish, share, and discover GI services semantically. By ontologies, formal meanings of concepts are defined to annotate and discover GI services on a conceptual level for semantic interoperability. With the assistance of multi-agents, the processes in MAKOCI can be divided into various modules and be communicated based on the same semantics in ontologies. A prototype was implemented to test MAKOCI. Finally, we conclude the advantages and disadvantages of MAKOCI and point out several future works.

Highlights

The explosive growth of the Internet in recent years has led to significant advances in the use of Web services, instead of conventional software tools, for processing data and exchanging information [Kvaløy et al, 2005]
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) recently has built a unique and revolutionary framework of open standards, called sensor Web enablement (SWE), for exploiting Webconnected sensors and sensor systems of all types: flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams, satellite-borne earth imaging devices and countless other sensors and sensor systems via Web services [Jaeger et al, 2005]
The observed data by these sensors are often accompanied with geographical information, such as place names or coordinates, and can be considered as one type of geographic information services (GI services)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The explosive growth of the Internet in recent years has led to significant advances in the use of Web services, instead of conventional software tools, for processing data and exchanging information [Kvaløy et al, 2005]. In earth observations, observed data (e.g., satellite images or phenomenon measured by in-situ sensors) can be encoded into Web services for sharing and communication. While sharing and integrating heterogeneous GI services, a central platform for search required GI services and semantically interoperate these GI services [Egenhofer, 2002; Kuhn, 2003] appear more critical. 1 http://geo.data.gov 2 http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Welcome semantic heterogeneity described above hampered among users as well, especially when they use different keywords to search GI services in the platform. This study aims to develop an ontology-enabled multi-agent platform, which facilitates ontologies to define common understandings for semantic interoperability, and uses multi agents to assist Web service providers and consumers to register and discovery GI services in the platform.

BACKGROUND

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK