Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In order to facilitate the user creation and edition of ontologies, tools like
Protégé
1
or G-Match had appeared for building and/or merging ontologies
towards a domain reference one.
Many researchers had discussed the state of the art of conventional ontolo-
gies and geographic ones including tourism and made comparisons about
the available tools for building and/or matching and aligning ontologies.
Besides, Spatial Ontology Community of Practice (SOCoP
2
) provides a
good forum for exposing and coordinating geospatial ontologies.
However, due to the limitation in paper size, the related works for geo-
ontologies will not be detailed in this article.
We will just focus on the novelty in this domain that could be used for our
purpose.
Furthermore, we want to present what OGC had implemented as standards
for generating maps:
•
According to OGC specification, a Web Feature Service (WFS) pro-
vides an interface allowing requests for geographic features across the
web using platform-independent calls. The response for a “Get Capa-
bilities” request returns capabilities such as: name, title, longi-
tude/latitude, etc. WFS rely on Geographic Markup Language (GML),
in order to insure interoperability, but does not allow alone for semantic
interoperability, thus the need for semantic integration ontology behind.
•
The Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol for serving geo
referenced map images over the Internet that are generated by a map
server using data from a GIS database. It produces maps as image or
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic). Individual maps can be requested from
different servers and accurately overlaid to produce a composite map
via WIS (Web Integrator Service) but this type of integration will keep
the copyright and other built in proprietary visual aspects of each pro-
vider's map (e.g. legend, source, scale, etc.).
1
http://protege.stanford.edu/
2
http://www.socop.org/
