W-Ray: A strategy to publish deep web geographic data

Abstract

This paper introduces an approach to address the problem of accessing conventional and geographic data from the Deep Web. The approach relies on describing the relevant data through well-structured sentences, and on publishing the sentences as Web pages, following the W3C and the Google recommendations. For conventional data, the sentences are generated with the help of database views. For vector data, the topological relationships between the objects represented are first generated, and then sentences are synthesized to describe the objects and their topological relationships. Lastly, for raster data, the geographic objects overlapping the bounding box of the data are first identified with the help of a gazetteer, and then sentences describing such objects are synthesized. The Web pages thus generated are easily indexed by traditional search engines, but they also facilitated the task of more sophisticated engines that support semantic search based on natural language features. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.