Application Schema Mapping based on Ontology: An Approach for Geospatial Data Storage

The heterogeneous nature of geospatial data makes the sharing of it across organizations a complex issue. As a standard means of geospatial data encoding, Geography Markup Language (GML) has been proposed by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which facilitates sharing and exchange of geospatial information. With the proliferation of GML in many geospatial applications and storage support from the standard DBMS, the need arises for the efficient storage mechanism of GML data. This paper analyses approaches for XML data storage in traditional DBMS and proposes alternative solutions for GML. Every GML document structure is defined in an application schema. We propose an approach for GML storage based on the analysis of the underlying application schema. A semi-automatic mapping mechanism has been proposed for the application schema to relational schemas of standard database with the utilization of the domain ontology. A set of relational schema is presumed to exist for different geospatial features. The proposed ontology based schema-matching approach for GML storage enhances the mapping process, thus facilitates sharing of heterogeneous data repositories.