Leveraging OWL for GIS interoperability: rewards and pitfalls

Information systems often require combining datasets available in different formats, and geographical information systems are no exception. While semantic technologies have been used before to enable interoperability between relational databases, little research has yet been done for the special case of geographical information systems, despite their applications in active areas of research such as location-based services. In this paper we present an OWLbased system for seamless conversion between geographical file formats. While implementing this system we reached the complexity limits of current description logics reasoners and had to design custom algorithms to compute the logical inferences we needed. This process suggested interesting approaches to enable scalable reasoning on the semantic web. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.2.5 [Information Systems]: Heterogeneous Databases – Data translation General Terms Algorithms, Design, Standardization. Keywords Geographic Informat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Serge Boucher, Esteban Zimányi
• Keywords: Geographical Information Systems, Information Systems, SAC 2009, Semantic Web