Gis Interoperability, from Problems to Solutions

Presently, a lot of Geographic Information Systems are operating all over the world, especially in administrations, and one of the problems is to make them cooperate, especially at the data level, such as an institution can profit from the data of another institution. This problem is identified as GIS interoperability since the idea is to share not only data but also programs and services. The goal of this article is to present the main issues that must be addressed to achieve interoperability among several GIS, and to discuss the variety of solutions proposed. Two main approaches have been distinguished: syntactic and semantic interoperability. As syntactic interoperability can be solved by extensions of CORBA, presently the proposed solutions of semantic interoperability are based on ontologies and mediators.