An architecture for interoperable GIS use in a local community environment

Many organizations in the local community environment use and produce geospatial data. An increasing number of geodata producers and users have expressed the need for the integration of geodata and for interoperable geographic information systems (GIS). Each of these user groups has a different view of the world and available information is always distributed and mostly heterogeneous. Wrappers and mediation may resolve structural and syntactic heterogeneity. However, domain experts use the concepts and terminology specific to their fields of expertise, and use different parameters to express their model of a concept. Such semantic heterogeneity of data sources causes serious problems, which may be resolved by ontologies. The goal of our research is to define an architecture, called GeoNis, for semantic interoperability of distributed and heterogeneous GIS in a local community environment. The proposed architecture is based on mediation and ontologies. GeoNis solution to the problem of semantic heterogeneity is to formally specify the meaning of the terminology of each community using local ontology and to define a translation between each community terminologies and an intermediate terminology represented by top-level ontology and common data model.