Adam Iwaniak

An initial formal model for spatial data infrastructures

The Commission on Spatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association is working to define formal models and technical characteristics of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). To date, this work has been restricted to the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints from the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing standard. The Commission has developed models for these two viewpoints. These models describe how the different parts of an SDI fit together in the viewpoints in question. These models should be seen as a contribution towards the overall model of the SDI and its technical characteristics. During the model development process, the roles of the different Actors in an SDI in the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints have also been identified in Use Case diagrams of an SDI. All the models have been developed using the Unified Modeling Language. ✠ This author passed away in September 2007.

The Academic SDI—Towards Understanding Spatial Data Infrastructures for Research and Education

The demand for geospatial data across different disciplines and organisations has led to the development and implementation of spatial data infrastructures (SDI) and the theory and concepts behind them. An SDI is an evolving concept about facilitating and coordinating the exchange of geospatial data and services between stakeholders from different levels in the spatial data community. Universities and other research organisations typically have well-established libraries and digital catalogues for scientific literature, but catalogues for geospatial data are rare. Geospatial data is widely used in research, but geospatial data produced by researchers is seldom available, accessible and usable, e.g., for purposes of teaching or further research after completion of the project. This chapter describes the experiences of a number of SDI implementations at universities and research institutes. Based on this, the Academic SDI, an SDI for research and education, is defined and its stakeholders are described. The purpose, scope and stakeholders of the Academic SDI are described based on the formal model of an SDI developed by the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commission on SDIs and Standards (formerly the Commission on Geoinformation Infrastructures and Standards). The results contribute to understanding the state-of-the-art in SDI implementations at universities and research institutes; how the Academic SDI differs from a ‘regular’ SDI; and which role players need to be involved in a successful SDI implementation for research and education.

Enriching and improving the quality of linked data with GIS

Abstract Standardization of methods for data exchange in GIS has along history predating the creation of World Wide Web. The advent of World Wide Web brought the emergence of new solutions for data exchange and sharing including; more recently, standards proposed by the W3C for data exchange involving Semantic Web technologies and linked data. Despite the growing interest in integration, GIS and linked data are still two separate paradigms for describing and publishing spatial data on the Web. At the same time, both paradigms offer complementary ways of representing real world phenomena and means of analysis using different processing functions. The complementarity of linked data and GIS can be leveraged to synergize both paradigms resulting in richer data content and more powerful inferencing. The article presents an approach aimed at integrating linked data with GIS. The approach relies on the use of GIS tools for integration, verification and enrichment of linked data. The GIS tools are employed to enrich linked data by furnishing access to collection of data resources, defining relationship between data resources, and subsequently facilitating GIS data integration with linked data. The proposed approach is demonstrated with examples using data from DBpedia, OSM, and tools developed by the authors for standard GIS software.

A Novel Approach for Publishing Linked Open Geodata from National Registries with the Use of Semantically Annotated Context Dependent Web Pages

Many of the standards used to build spatial data infrastructure (SDI), such as Web Map Service (WMS) or Web Feature Service (WFS), have become outdated. They do not follow current web technology development and do not fully exploit its capabilities. Spatial data often remains available only through application programming interfaces (APIs), reflecting the persistence of organizational silos. The potential of the web for discovering knowledge hidden in data and discoverable through integration and fusion remains very difficult. This article presents a strategy to take advantage of these newer semantic web technologies for SDI. We describe the implementation of a public registry in the age of Web 3.0. Our goal is to convert existing geographic information systems (GIS) data into explicit knowledge that can be easily used for a variety of purposes. This turns SDI into a framework to utilize the many advantages of the web. In this paper we present the working prototype system developed for the province of Mazowieckie in Poland and describes the underlying concepts. Further development of this approach comes from using linked data (LD) with expert systems to support analysis functions and tasks.

Information Retrieval in the Geodetic and Cartographic Documentation Centers

The paper addresses the problem of geo-referenced documents management and discovery, concerning the use of metadata and ontology. It shows, that the metadata profile developed for the INSPIRE does not meet the requirements set out for the documents retrieving in the documentation centers as well as the majority of the public administration offices. It highlights the need of building the tools for indirect and hidden references and metadata attributes exploration of the geodetic documents like field sketches and others. It indicates the possibility of using ontology, which extending the metadata profile would allow to link different types of documents that correlate indirectly in the space and time.