Extending Geospatial Repositories with Geosemantic Proximity Functionalities to Facilitate the Interoperability of Geospatial Data

Today, with the common availability of Internet technologies, interoperability of geospatial data has become a necessity for sharing and integrating geospatial data. More specifically, it is seen as a solution to solve syntactic, structural, semantic, geometric and temporal heterogeneities between data sources. In Canada, we observe such heterogeneities from existing geospatial databases. For example, Vegetation , Trees , Wooded area , Wooded area , Milieu boisé and Zone boisée (unknown geometry), found in different geospatial data specifications, describe the same type of phenomena. Recently, we have proposed a conceptual framework for geospatial data interoperability based on human communication concepts. This framework introduces the idea of geosemantic proximity, which provides reasoning capabilities to assess the semantic, geometric, and temporal similarities between geospatial concepts and geospatial conceptual representations. In the present paper, we review the conceptual framework and present an architecture of a system based on this framework. In fact, the architecture uses a geospatial repository, namely Perceptory, as a data source’s ontology upon which we add geosemantic proximity functionalities. These functionalities evaluate the similarity of the information stored in the data source with the information required by another one in order to facilitate the interoperability of geospatial data.