Semantic Interoperability of Geospatial Services

This article proposes a multi-agent based framework that allows multiple data sources and models to be semantically integrated for spatial modeling in business processing. The paper reviews the feasibility of ontology-based spatial resource integration options to combine the core spatial reasoning with domainspecific application models. We propose an ontology-based framework for semantic level communication of spatial objects and application models. We then introduce a multi-agent system, ontology-based spatial information and resource integration services (OSIRIS), to semantically interoperate complex spatial services and integrate them in a meaningful composition. The advantage of using multi-agent collaboration in OSIRIS is that it obviates the need for end-user analysts to be able to decompose a problem domain to subproblems or to map different models according to what they actually mean. We also illustrate a multi-agent interaction scenario for collaborative modeling of spatial applications using the proposed custom feature of OSIRIS.