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flat files to specialized geographic information systems (GIS). As we will il-
lustrate in the following sections, geospatial Web services provide an effective
means to request geospatial data from heterogeneous repositories in a format
suitable for data integration tasks. Such services help greatly in dealing with
data heterogeneity and conflict resolution aspects in data integration. Further
data integration challenges, such as heterogeneity of the data in terms of struc-
ture and semantics are often dealt with by employing standard representation
formats and taxonomies, respectively. In particular, for these two aspects, we
show that there have been significant achievements in various subdisciplines
of the geosciences, especially in the development of schema frameworks for
describing geospatial data and metadata/taxonomy frameworks that focus on
the semantics of geospatial data components.
A novel aspect we focus on in this chapter is the integration of streaming
real-time data, which is becoming a predominant source of geospatial data,
for example, in remote-sensing and sensor observation networks. We describe
recent technologies that have been developed for the service-based manage-
ment and consumption of streaming geospatial data and show how comput-
ing infrastructures can be built that effectively consume diverse static as well
as dynamic (streaming) geospatial data from heterogeneous and distributed
data sources. General techniques for managing streaming data are discussed
in Chapter 11.
The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. In Section 10.2, we
review basic geospatial data management and integration concepts, including
data formats, metadata standards, and existing approaches and techniques to
geospatial data integration. In Section 10.3, we discuss in detail the technolo-
gies surrounding geospatial Web services. Furthermore, we outline emerging
technologies in the context of sensor Web enablement architectures. In Section
10.4, we use a relevant practical scenario from the environmental sciences to
demonstrate how the different techniques presented in this chapter can effec-
tively be deployed to perform geospatial data integration tasks, including the
integration of real-time sensor data. We conclude the chapter in Section 10.5
with a summary.
10.2 Geospatial Data Management and Integration
In this section, we review some fundamental concepts and techniques for the
management of geospatial data. In Section 10.2.1, we give a brief overview
of geospatial data models and representation formats. Section 10.2.2 outlines
some standard approaches to managing geospatial data. Our particular focus
in these two sections is on issues relevant to interoperability and integration
aspects. After a discussion of schema and metadata concepts in Section 10.2.3,
we discuss in Section 10.2.4 some existing approaches for integrating geospa-
tial data.
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