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Ontology-Based Geospatial Data Query and Integration

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Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5266))

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Abstract

Geospatial data sharing is an increasingly important subject as large amount of data is produced by a variety of sources, stored in incompatible formats, and accessible through different GIS applications. Past efforts to enable sharing have produced standardized data format such as GML and data access protocols such as Web Feature Service (WFS). While these standards help enabling client applications to gain access to heterogeneous data stored in different formats from diverse sources, the usability of the access is limited due to the lack of data semantics encoded in the WFS feature types. Past research has used ontology languages to describe the semantics of geospatial data but ontology-based queries cannot be applied directly to legacy data stored in databases or shapefiles, or to feature data in WFS services. This paper presents a method to enable ontology query on spatial data available from WFS services and on data stored in databases. We do not create ontology instances explicitly and thus avoid the problems of data replication. Instead, user queries are rewritten to WFS getFeature requests and SQL queries to database. The method also has the benefits of being able to utilize existing tools of databases, WFS, and GML while enabling query based on ontology semantics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI,  

    Tian Zhao

  2. Dept. of Geography & the Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs, CT,  

    Chuanrong Zhang

  3. U.S. Geological Survey, Rolla, MO,  

    Mingzhen Wei

  4. Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning, College of Transportation Engineering, Univ. of Florida, Tongji University, Gainesville, Shanghai, FL, China

    Zhong-Ren Peng

Authors
  1. Tian Zhao
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  2. Chuanrong Zhang
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  3. Mingzhen Wei
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  4. Zhong-Ren Peng
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Editor information

Thomas J. Cova Harvey J. Miller Kate Beard Andrew U. Frank Michael F. Goodchild

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zhao, T., Zhang, C., Wei, M., Peng, ZR. (2008). Ontology-Based Geospatial Data Query and Integration. In: Cova, T.J., Miller, H.J., Beard, K., Frank, A.U., Goodchild, M.F. (eds) Geographic Information Science. GIScience 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5266. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87473-7_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87473-7_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-87472-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-87473-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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