Toward semantic web infrastructure for spatial features' information

Abstract

The Web and its capabilities can be employed as a tool for data and information integration if comprehensive datasets and appropriate technologies and standards enable the web with interpretation and easy alignment of data and information. Semantic Web along with the spatial functionalities enable the web to deal with the huge amount of data and information. The present study investigate the advantages and limitations of the Spatial Semantic Web and compare its capabilities with relational models in order to build a spatial data infrastructure. An architecture is proposed and a set of criteria is defined for the efficiency evaluation. The result demonstrate that when using the data with special characteristics such as schema dynamicity, sparse data or available relations between the features, the spatial semantic web and graph databases with spatial operations are preferable.