Ontology - based GIS web service for increasing semantic interoperability among organizations involving drilling in city of Tehran

Organizations whose activities involve drilling in city of Tehran cause several damages to urban resources as well as wasting money and human resources, as a result of lack of information about underground facilities, not collaborating to share information with other organizations and inaccurate data. However, if these organization share a standardized set of geospatial data in a unified comprehensive network and develop methods to discover, access and use of this information, can prevent collision of drilling paths. Local Spatial Data Infrastructure (LSDI) prepares a way for these organizations to share spatial data and have access to the recently updated information of other organizations. From the point of view of SDI, to achieve this level of collaboration, several activities should be considered; one of which is interoperability among geospatial information systems. This goal is attained when these systems have full structural, syntactic and semantic comprehension of each other. As long as syntactic and structural heterogeneity are already handled by different methods, semantic interoperability is considered as the most important factor in data sharing. Ontology, which is specification of a conceptualization, can lead to semantic communication among systems by gathering concepts and definitions from different organizations and finding relationship between them. In this paper, the role of LSDI to facilitate data sharing was studied, the significance of ontology in semantic interoperability among organizations involving drilling in city of Tehran was investigated and finally an ontology-based GIS web service system was designed and a pilot was successfully applied in one region of Tehran.