Overview of Study on Geo spatial Data Integration

Abstract

Application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and multi resources geo spatial data promotes the appearance of digital geo spatial data integration in 1960's. But the weakness of study on geo spatial data integration hinders its own development. As a overview on geo spatial data integration, the paper focuses on fundamental concept, theory of data integration and problems in geo spatial data integration research currently. Geo spatial data is one kind of data used to represent, describe geographical processes and geographical phenomena. From the point view of geographical cognition, geo spatial data is abstraction of geographical entity controlled by geographical knowledge. Geo spatial data integration, as argued by many researchers, is the process during which multi resources and multi scale geo spatial data can be used in one uniform GIS software platform. The goals of geo spatial data integration, put simply, are creating seamless (including attribute seamless, temporal seamless and spatial seamless) dataset or database for certain application or general construction of geo spatial database. Study of geo spatial data integration mainly focus on data integration mechanism, error transfer, data quality controlling, multi scale, and representation of geo spatial data. Also many successful application of geo spatial data integration were carried out, but there are still many shortcomings of the fundamental researches on geo spatial data integration, such as integration principles, error propagation rules, multi scale data integration and data quality evaluation and controlling. The main problems about geo spatial data integration are short of general integration principles and rules, weak studying on geo spatial metadata, ignoring the applications of geo sciences principles and rules. Based on the analysis on geo spatial data integration, the authors list out some further research field on data integration such as network based data integration, data integration principles, metadata utility in data integration, geo sciences expert knowledge system and their application in geo spatial data integration.