Semantic access to INSPIRE How to publish and query advanced GML data

The INSPIRE Directive establishes a pan-European ”Spatial Data Infrastructure” (SDI) to make available multiple thematic datasets from the EU member states through stable Geo Web-Services. Parallel to this ongoing procedure, the Semantic Web has technologically fostered the Linked Data initiative which builds up huge repositories of freely collected data for public access. Querying both data categories within distributed searches looks promising. To tackle the associated prerequisites, this paper presents firstly a general approach to translate sophisticated INSPIRE GML data models into Semantic Web OWL ontologies. This is done according to Linked Data principles while preserving selective INSPIRE structural information as annotations. Secondly, a feasible conversion of the Semantic Web query language SPARQL to its Geo Web counterpart ”OGC Filter Encoding” is proposed. The language mapping is required for a semantic wrapper over remote INSPIRE Download Services acting as a SPARQL-endpoint and bridging the gap between both worlds.