Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
value-added products in diverse formats, e.g. VRML, 3D animations, fly-by
animation, and interactive Internet maps. The geospatial data, coupled with
the GIS and Global Positioning System (GPS), can benefit both businesses
and governments in making decisions such as business facilities and site selec-
tion, demographic analyses, route selection, zoning, planning, conservation,
natural resource extraction, natural and man-made damage assessment, and
national security. Despite these numerous benefits, due to its easy availability
and due to the powerful analysis tools for the geospatial data, it may pose
serious threats to security and privacy. These geospatial data can be sensitive
since objects located in a particular location may be of national importance
that are vulnerable to attacks. These may include, for example, cultural land-
marks or critical infrastructure facilities such as water distribution, telecom-
munication, bridges, tunnels, and nuclear plants, which may cause a large
scale socio-economic impact in case of failure [5].
In addition to the security threats outlined above, availability of geospa-
tial data sometimes may reveal positional information of a person, which may
give rise to privacy threats, as he/she can be easily located and even tracked.
Similarly, any sensitive activities conducted on a certain location may need
to be kept confidential. In addition to protecting single activities, one may
need prevent adversaries to be able to discover patterns and hidden trends
of individuals by combining other publicly available geospatial data with the
activities conducted at those locations. To ensure the above security and pri-
vacy needs, there is a need for specification and enforcement of policies for
controlled dissemination of the geospatial data.
Another challenge pertaining to securing geospatial data is due to the
increasing use of the geospatial Web service technology to easily share and in-
tegrate the geospatial data and applications on demand. Previously, sharing of
geospatial data had been much more dicult due to the heterogeneities among
their format and metrics. These geospatial Web services allow to easily cre-
ate geospatial ”mash-ups” that are nothing but light-weight applications that
help in integrating diverse location based information. Such examples include
(i) Google Maps API's that facilitate viewing of various types of information
of different locations on Web browsers [15], (ii) Google Earth [14] that pro-
vides more or less the entire world's geographic information by empowering
its search engine with satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings where
one can fly-to and zoom-in a certain address, get 3D view of terrain and build-
ings and search schools, parks, hotels, restaurants and get driving directions,
and (iii) Microsoft Virtual Earth [18] that uses Web services in combination
with a search engine to provide real time business intelligence information,
such as high-resolution bird's eye imagery, the dynamic, drag-and-drop maps
or highly-visual path maps.
These geospatial Web Services can be invoked using a set of XML-based
standard programs and can be embedded into applications integrating many
other kinds of data. Sharing of these Web services should be done in such a
way that it preserves the security and privacy specifications of their respective
