Design and development of linked data from The National Map

摘要

The development of linked data on the World-Wide Web provides the opportunity for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to supply its extensive volumes of geospatial data, information, and knowledge in a machine interpretable form and reach users and applications that heretofore have been unavailable. To pilot a process to take advantage of this opportunity, the USGS is developing an ontology for The National Map and converting selected data from nine research test areas to a Seman tic Web format to support machine processing and linked data access. In a case study, the USGS has developed initial methods for legacy vector and raster formatted geometry, attributes, and spatial relationships to be accessed in a linked data environ ment maintaining the capability to generate graphic or image output from semantic queries. The description of an initial USGS approach to developing ontology, linked data, and initial query capability from The National Map databases is presented.