Methodology for geospatial data source discovery in ontology-driven geo-information integration architectures

摘要

Due to advances in information, communication and sensing technologies, the amount of generated geospatial information is constantly growing. Since geospatial information is generated and made available over the Internet by different stakeholders, heterogeneity of geospatial data and geospatial data sources becomes inevitable. This heterogeneity of globally available geospatial data sources introduces great challenges for individuals who are trying to discover and assemble geospatial data from distributed geospatial data sources. From the standpoint of individuals who do not belong to Geo-Information System (GIS) realm but belong to a group of geoportal users group, the process of discovering and accessing heterogeneous geospatial data has proven to be a difficult one to govern. Since geoportals are foreseen as single points of discovery and access to geo-information, geoportal users expect geoportal to provide them with a mechanism to easily find (discover) what they are searching for, using their own language. Such mechanism would significantly improve the usability of a geoportal and user satisfaction. The implementation of such mechanism highly depends on the infrastructure a geoportal relies on-an interoperable geo-information dissemination environment.