Rule-based Discovery in Spatial Data Infrastructures

Answering questions based on spatial data is becoming increasingly important in a variety of domains. Often the required data are distributed and heterogeneous, and several data sources need to be combined in order to derive the information required by a user. Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) are aimed at making the discovery and access to distributed geographic data more efficient. However, the catalogue services currently used in SDIs for discovering geographic data do not allow expressive queries and do not take into account that more than one data source might be required to answer a question. In this paper, we illustrate how Semantic Web technology can be used to enhance the discovery of geographic data and to generate an answer to a specific question. The approach is based on rules describing mappings between local data and a common domain vocabulary as well as back-ground domain knowledge. We illustrate how these rules can be used to infer information for answering a user’s question and to discover data sources that can be used for these inferences. The approach is illustrated by an example from the domain of disaster management.

LUTZ Michael;  KOLAS Dave; 

2007-05-16

Blackwell Publishing Ltd

JRC34496

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC34496,