Integrating Forestry and Local Administrative Data Using Semantic and GIS Technologies

Abstract

Linking National Forest Inventory (NFI) data with local administrative units (LAUs) unlocks a wealth of benefits for forest management. It enhances precision in assessments, facilitates policy alignment, optimizes resource allocation, and enables effective monitoring and research at the local level. This study presents an automated process to convert official Spanish municipality geometries from the National Geographic Institute's geospatial database into Linked Open Data (LOD) format. This facilitates the assignment of Spanish NFI plots to their corresponding municipalities using GeoSPARQL and their publication in an open LOD repository. Additionally, we compared the results of this assignment with a GIS-based solution. To demonstrate the potential of this spatial integration, we conducted analyses in two case studies. This work highlights the benefits of integrating forest information with other cross-domain data using Semantic Web technologies, which can be further complemented by GIS software for spatial analysis.