Semantic Web Geoportal: a Case Study of Ontology Driven Kenya National Spatial Data Infrastructure
Abstract
This research has dealt with one of the geospatial data sharing problems namely,
semantic interoperability. The motivation of this research is the current Kenya National
Spatial Data Infrastructure (KNSDI) that is being implemented and which require open
and interoperable systems.
The last few decades have shown a major shift in computing from stand-alone software
systems to networked ones. There is an increasing need for organizations to perform on
demand geo-processing tasks by integrating and reusing geo-information and geoservices
from within and outside the organization. These services are best perfomed
within a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)
The current state-of-art technology for sharing geospatial information is Geospatial Web
Services. Effective use of geo-information requires easy access to metadata that describes
the geospatial data and services. However, current descriptions of data and services
advanced by KNSDI do not provide the semantics or meaning of the data content and
therefore are not sufficient to allow semantic interoperability. For KNSDI to be effective
overcoming semantic interoperability problem is an issue that requires a solution.
To address this problem, the research deals with developing an ontology, entailing a
common vocabulary for concepts and the relationships between them in an SDI. Using
protege ontology editor the concepts are mapped as classes and their properties and facets
specified. Lastly, instances which are the actual metadata in an SDI are keyed into the
prototype. From the prototype it is possible to query for different properties of the
metadata.
From this research it can be concluded that ontologies can be used in organizing metadata
in software application to support interoperable machine to machine interaction over a
network. It is recommended that the proposed KNSDI makes use of ontologies in
presenting its data and metadata.
KEYWORDS Ontology, Semantics, Spatial Data Infrastructure, GIS and metadata
Publisher
University Of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
The following license files are associated with this item: