Interoperable sharing and visualization of geological data and instruments: A proof of concept

Abstract

Traditionally, maps and data were analyzed and created by desktop software tools. Today, thanks to World Wide Web, open source software tools and international standards, practitioners and researchers can share maps, data, and measures. Sharing can be done with different software tools, proprietary or open source, and with varying degrees of interoperability. Most geological maps and data collected by instruments are produced by governmental organizations and they are encoded in official languages and data schemas of their producers. Linguistic barrier, different visual representations and data schemas hinder the usefulness of online maps and data, obtained from different sources. In the present paper, we report a research aiming to overcome these aforementioned barriers. To this end, after having described their main characteristics, we exploited and summarized the main findings of using geoscience thesauri, international standards for web sharing, visual and data harmonization. We used GeoScience Markup Language (GeoSciML-Portayal) to harmonize geological maps collected in the context of a multidisciplinary study focused on a coastal area located in Southern Italy, (Costa Viola); Sensor Metadata Language (SensorML) to describe geological instruments; Observations and Measurements (O&M) to harmonize geological data collected by instruments. We used geoscience thesauri based on Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to enrich semantically the aforementioned geological maps, data and instruments. A distributed Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), implemented using free and open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G), was provided taking advantage on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards to share data and information in an interoperable, harmonized and semantically enriched way.