Applying semantic web technologies for geodata integration and visualization

Nowadays new applications ask for enriching the semantics associated to geographic information in order to support a wide variety of tasks including data integration, interoperability, knowledge reuse, spatial reasoning and many others. This paper proposes a new framework called GeoShare, which supports for semantic integration and querying over heterogeneous geospatial data sets distributed over the grid environment. In GeoShare we try to resolve semantic heterogeneity by using an RDF-View based approach for schema mediation and focus on embedding domain semantics in geographic maps. A series of grid services such as ontology service, semantic registry service, and semantic query service with a set of innovative semantic tools are brought forward to accomplish these purposes. A visualization module also presents at the upper level of GeoShare to automatically generate Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) maps embedded with domain semantics as an ideal data view to end users.