On development of search engine for geodata

Abstract

Effective management and sharing of geodata is one of the priorities of the European Union (INSPIRE activity) and companies all around the world. Many different companies and organisations publish their geodata using web mapping services. This situation leads to a multiple publishing of similar or completely same geodata. On the other hand, there is frequently a problem how to determine an appropriate mapserver with the required data. This paper presents a geodata search engine which solves the problem how to access geodata more effectively. Presented solution aggregates data from the different mapservers and provides an interface according to the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Server specification. This allows to use our solution in the standard GIS tools as common mapserver. Completely new feature is a request which allows to select map layers which fulfills specified criteria. Selection could be given by keywords in a map layer description and by defining a bounding box on Earth surface. Response is a list of appropriate layers sorted according to their relevance. Presented solution could be among other applications significant source of information for many data mining techniques. It allows to interconnect processed data with their space-temporal context.