Geospatial Data Sharing Based on Geospatial Semantic Web Technologies

Geospatial data sharing is a concern in geospatial science because of the heterogeneity of existing geographical information systems. This study aims to examine the use of Geospatial Semantic Web technologies such as ontology, web services and the service-oriented architecture for enabling disparate heterogeneous legacy GIS to share and integrate information in a cost effective way to reduce spatial data duplication. A framework based on the Geospatial Semantic Web technologies is proposed in this study. Experimental results from an implemented prototype show that the proposed framework allows searching and accessing geospatial data and services at the semantic level based on their content instead of keywords in the metadata.