Spatial Reasoning for Information Brokering

The World Wide Web provides new opportunities for collecting information from distributed, multiple, and heterogeneous data sources. Information brokering can be used to provide coordinated access to these sources if they are structured or semi-structured. The BUSTER (Bremen University Semantic Translator for Enhanced Retrieval) approach provides enabling technologies for information search and integration and can be seen as an information broker. However, it is not possible to represent and reason about spatial objects. In this paper, we motivate the need for the integration of spatial representation and reasoning. We start with information brokering in general and proceed with a brief overview of BUSTER. In the following, use cases are defined that demand certain representations and reasoning methods and give examples for these cases. We discuss gazetteers as an example of seeking spatial objects and discuss shortcomings of this approach. We conclude with a new concept for an extension of BUSTER with explicit representations of spatial concepts and reasoning mechanisms that can be applied in order to support spatial information brokering.