Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
screen. Some deficiencies might be encountered as detailed in (Karam et
al. 2010) which are related to 1) the lack of real time updates in GDBs for
place names and semantic details, 2) GPS precision and different reference
systems for geographic positions and 3) proprietary base maps and differ-
ent legends for each service provider.
3- Related Works
Currently, we can find visual portals listing services from many providers
in alphabetical order or according to user's preferences (Laurini et al.
2008). This interface is not user-friendly if we have a long list of services
to scroll down. Another visualization is to represent services by shapes and
the correspondent providers by their colors but we are limited to maximum
ten colors for better perception thus ten providers. Another approach is
based on a 3D perspective street view map where the services are listed as
place names with arrows. Overlap of place names in 3D and cognitive dif-
ficulties had lead to the usage of icons instead of place names with info
window to show their semantic details.
On the other hand, ontology engineering is considered as providing solu-
tions to semantically integrate several data sources. From Artificial Intelli-
gence to Semantic Web, conventional ontologies are defined as a collec-
tion of concepts C, Instances I, Properties P, Axioms A and relations
defined on these concepts to represent the knowledge in a certain domain
of interest and provide reasoning and inference mechanisms (James et al.
2010). Medellin, Serna, Vargas and Ruiz in (Medellin et al. 2009) had
mentioned how the use of ontologies offers some advantages for the inte-
gration of geographic information on the web. Fonseca, Camara and Mon-
teiro in (Fonseca et al. 2006) had considered that if the use of ontologies is
part of geographic information system (ODGIS, Ontology-Driven GIS), it
can present multiple interpretations or roles of a same geographic feature
(e.g. lake for the department of water is different in meaning as for the
environment scientist or a tourism department). ODGIS acts as a system
integrator of the model with many levels (top level ontology/domain, task
ontologies then application ontology). We can use ODGIS framework to
interpret images or icons with other kind of geographic information in a
smooth and flexible way.
