A geo-ontology to support the semantic integration of geoinformation from the National Spatial Data Infrastructure

The profusion of geoinformation and the diversity of providers increasingly demand availability of integrated geoinformation. The Brazilian National Spatial Data Infrastructure (INDE) and the Web 2.0 technologies provide the existence of such solutions. In this context, geoinformation needs to be discovered and processed, seamlessly and semantically interoperable through the services offered by INDE, independently of the existing technological arrangement. It is essential to have an information model that represents the involved concepts, their characteristics and their relationships. The development of a geo-ontology, in order to consolidate aspects of spatial metadata, spatial features and geographic names, is the challenge addressed by this work.