A novel approach for publishing linked open geodata from national registries with the use of semantically annotated context dependent web pages

Abstract

Many of the standards used to build spatial data infrastructure (SDI), such as Web Map Service (WMS) orWeb Feature Service (WFS), have become outdated. They do not follow current web technology development and do not fully exploit its capabilities. Spatial data often remains available only through application programming interfaces (APIs), reflecting the persistence of organizational silos. The potential of the web for discovering knowledge hidden in data and discoverable through integration and fusion remains very difficult. This article presents a strategy to take advantage of these newer semantic web technologies for SDI. We describe the implementation of a public registry in the age of Web 3.0. Our goal is to convert existing geographic information systems (GIS) data into explicit knowledge that can be easily used for a variety of purposes. This turns SDI into a framework to utilize the many advantages of the web. In this paper we present the working prototype system developed for the province of Mazowieckie in Poland and describes the underlying concepts. Further development of this approach comes from using linked data (LD) with expert systems to support analysis functions and tasks.