Towards Integration of Geographic Information Systems

Nowadays, geographic information is increasingly used by several entities around the world. Then, the need of sharing information from different sources is an obvious consequence from such proliferation of systems. Unfortunately, integrating geographic information is not a trivial issue. We must deal with several heterogeneity problems, which increase complexity of integration approaches. In order to alleviate some problems, we introduce an integration process based on two main sets of tasks – non-logic and logic. The former is aimed at finding similarities based on structural and syntactic analyzes of geographic data; and the latter is used to calculate inferences from semantics of data by using ontologies. We illustrate the approach by integrating information from two governmental entities, which manage geographic information of North Patagonia, Argentina.