A Context Sensitive Model for Sharing Distributed Geospatial Information

Research on Interoperability of geospatial information systems is becoming widespread in GI research community. We have identified three types of heterogeneity: semantic, schematic, and semantic. We argue that the current technological development is focused on resolving the syntactical problems, with little to know attention to the schematic and semantic differences, respectively. In this paper we introduce a three-layered model to provide interoperability at the semantic level. Architecturally the model is built on a proven syntactical model known as the formal data structure. We will show how this model can be extended to incorporate solutions to the schematic and semantic differences.