INTEROP NETWORK TO SUPPORT GEOSPATIAL DATA SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY

摘要

This work describes a new NSF funded INTEROP project organized by the Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP, www.socop.org). Geospatial data, which give location information for geographic features, are pervasive across many disciplines and fundamental for diverse applications, such as economic development, natural resources, environmental protection, and emergency response. But, re-using geospatial data remains difficult because of its heterogeneity. Although progress has been made by initiatives such as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and Geospatial One-Stop to distribute data, it is now necessary to address issues of standards harmonization and agreement on the meanings of relevant concepts in diverse data sets due to different community views. The lack of semantic interoperability has been recognized as a stumbling block to collaboration. As a solution, well designed, formal ontologies, relying on agreements between communities on unambiguous representation of concepts and relationships for a given problem area, can be used as an analytic tool to bridge community gaps. The purpose of this INTEROP project is to create opportunities for the geospatial community to work on semantic agreements and use semantic mappings and other emerging Semantic Web technologies. An initial INTEROP Network is based on the existing SOCoP network that has a core group of active participants from academia, government, and industry. We now want to broaden the Network to cover various domains and include more participants. One of the purposes of this paper is to include the ASPRS community and gather additional use cases.