Lost and found, the importance of modelling map content semantically

Abstract

There is a growing demand within organisations to integrate and reuse geo-information and geo-information processes from within and outside the organisation. Geo-information is increasingly offered through on-line geo-services that dynamically generate geographic output based on a variety of inputs. The process of integrating geo-information and services requires that geo-information and services can be easily found, and that service calls are interoperable. Interoperability means that the services ‘understand’ each other’s messages. A major impediment is formed by the semantic heterogeneity (the differences in meaning) of map content and of the functionality of geo-services. Within this context, this chapter presents solutions for the computer-aided integration of distributed heterogeneous geo-information and geo-services, based on their semantics (the meaning of their content). The chapter provides an introduction to the Semantic Web and explains its application to the discovery and integration of map content and addresses the relevant issues of geographic information representation in this context. At the end it provides an example of a state of the art implementation.