Knowledge Bases in Spatial Data Infrastructures – A new Level of Decision Support

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) define a framework that allows online access to distributed geographic data and geoprocessing capabilities. They are typically based on distributed web services and aim to be a complementary approach to the predominating local management and processing of data sets. SDIs develop their real performance on national or international scales only in case that cross-system and cross-institutional interoperability is achieved. International accepted standards help to realize such large-scale distributed infrastructures assembled by numerous heterogeneous, but interoperating services. One of the most promising standardization efforts, which provides a suitable foundation to establish a standardized spatial data infrastructure is represented by the OpenGIS consortium (OGC). Beginning with a discussion of the OGC view and realisation of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) this article gives an in-detail view of this approach. Starting from OGC’s “Sensor Web Enablement” initiative, which allows the integration of real time data into SDI, an alerting framework is proposed, that make use of formalized knowledge which is applied to spatiotemporal measurement data provided by an SDI environment.