Space-Aware Data Integration for Ocean Observing Systems

Spatial features are important properties with respect to data integration in many areas such as ocean observational information and environmental decision making. In order to address the needs of these applications, we have to represent and reason about the spatial relevance of various data sources. In this paper, we develop and implement a space-aware data integration prototype system to facilitate retrieval and integration of data from the in situ ocean observing stations in the Gulf of Mexico. The prototype system adopt the state-of-the-art qualitative spatial representation and reasoning techniques to represent partonomic, distance, and topological, and directional relations to answer spatial-related queries.