Geospatial Resource Description Framework (GRDF) and security constructs

The Semantic Web enables an automated, ontology based information aggregation mechanism. In geographic domain, automatic aggregation is a particularly important task in light of the over-abundance of data formats and types. Because the formats and types are not necessarily uniform or adhere to a particular information structure, aggregating geospatial data with differing formats is a challenging task. The aggregation is extremely useful in many areas such as business, academic, homeland security and public awareness. In this paper, we propose a set of geospatial constructs written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) and collectively referred to as Geographic Resource Description Framework (GRDF).Our goal is to propose a broad, semantics-aware and expressive language for geospatial domain. The most important advantage GRDF has over other geospatial languages is the ability to use logical inference and dynamic content aggregation. We also publish our work on security constructs for GRDF that allows domain experts and software developers to address the security concerns as part of the core development process instead of an ad-hoc course of action.