Representation and Distribution of Geospatial Knowledge

Introduction Our project is concerned mainly with knowledge representation and the markup of information for webrelated uses, and potential applications of such markup. In particular, we are developing taxonomies of certain subsets of maritime information, using these taxonomies to develop markup vocabularies for these subsets, and developing sample applications (e.g., for information retrieval) using this markup. We focused in the first instance on XML markup representation and applications, while allowing for a future transition to semantic web technologies. The project idea pre-dated OWL (Web Ontology Language) and even DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language) – at the time the project commenced, RDF was the most recent Web technology related to knowledge representation. Our primary government partner was the U.S.Coast Guard; we have also discussed project products with other federal agencies.