A Semantic Approach to Describe Geospatial Resources

Geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly using geospatial data from the Web to produce geographic information. One big challenge is to find the relevant data, which often is based on keywords or even file names. However, these approaches lack semantics. Thus, it is necessary to provide mechanisms to prepare data to help retrieval of semantically relevant data. This paper proposes an approach to attack this problem. This approach is based on semantic annotations that use geographic metadata and ontologies to describe heterogeneous geospatial data. Semantic annotations are RDF/XML files that rely on a FGDC metadata schema, filled with appropriate ontology terms, and stored in a XML database. The proposal is illustrated by a case study of semantic annotations of agricultural resources, using domain ontologies.