An Ontology-Based GeoDatabase Interoperability Platform

This chapter presents an ontology-based platform enabling automatic translation between a large number of geographical formats and data models. It explains the organizational motivations for developing this system, the technologies used, how its architecture and processing components were developed, what it achieves and where it still needs improvement. Since current off-the-shelf description logic reasoners are unable to process the large ontologies involved in this system, this platform uses a custom mapping algorithm that scales gracefully and still computes the required information to effect translation between supported data formats. The authors believe that the lessons learned during this project and discussed in this chapter will prove especially useful to interoperability practitioners contemplating the use of semantic technologies for enabling large-scale integration across organizational boundaries.