Cad and Gis Interoperability through Semantic Web Services

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Geographical Information System (GIS) are being used in tandem to support a variety of decisions throughout the life cycle of civil infrastructure systems. Existing CAD and GIS platforms have been developed independently with different purposes resulting in significant differences in terms of data formats they support, terminology they utilize, semantics of concepts they represent, and reasoning techniques on which they are based. For this reason, existing CAD and GIS platforms are currently not interoperable, resulting in wasted time and money due to limitations associated with exchange of data and knowledge. Within the context of this paper, we highlight a set of interoperability challenges associated with CAD and GIS platforms and describe a web-service based approach that will enable semantic interoperability between these two platforms. The paper specifically discusses research challenges associated with different components of such a proposed semantic web-based approach; namely task decomposition, ontology identification, web service discovery and matching, and service composition.