Metadata community profiles for the Semantic Web

摘要

Metadata is needed to facilitate data sharing among geospatial information communities. Geographic Metadata Standards are available but tend to be general and complex in nature and also are not well suited to overcome semantic heterogeneities across vocabularies of different domains and user communities. Current formalizations of metadata standards are not flexible enough to allow reuse and extension of metadata specifications, in particular for Web based information systems. In order to address this problem we propose a methodology to create community specific metadata profiles for the Semantic Web by reusing metadata specifications and domain vocabularies encoded as resources for the Web. This ensures that these community profiles are semantically compatible so they can be used in Web based information systems. The ISO-19115:2003 geographic metadata standard is the most general standard available and is being used in conjunction with the Web Ontology Language as the expression medium to test the methodology for each one of the possible extensions documented in ISO-19115:2003. It is shown that it is possible to extend and reuse metadata specifications and vocabularies distributed in the Web using the Web Ontology Language, by utilizing the language's flexibility to create restrictions on inherit properties and to make interferences on web distributed resources. Examples from the area of Hydrology are provided to demonstrate the technical details of the approach.