Toward an Architecture for Enhancing Semantic Interoperability Based on Enrichment of Geospatial Data Semantics

Semantic interoperability is needed to support meaningful data exchanges in distributed environments such as ad hoc networks of geospatial databases and geospatial web services. Even with the recent increasing popularity of ontologies to capture semantics of geospatial resources, semantics of geospatial data are often implicit or too weak to support meaningful exchanges. In this paper, we argue that geospatial data that are semantically weak can be enriched to enhance semantic interoperability. We propose a conceptual architecture designed to support enhanced semantic interoperability in dynamic networks that focuses on semantic enrichment. The proposed conceptual architecture includes a coalition management module, an ontology enrichment module and a semantic mapping module; the modules perform different types of semantic enrichment and can be employed to support various semantic interoperability tasks. Within the different enrichment methods, we explain the role of global ontologies, arguing that they play a key role in a semantic interoperability framework. Finally, we illustrate with an application example the possibilities of such architecture.