A communication process account of the interoperability of geographic information

The number of geographic databases has increased throughout the world over the last fifteen years. At the beginning, they were developed by various organizations in response to their specific needs and, consequently, the same geographic phenomena were usually abstracted differently from one database to another, e.g. vegetation(sic), trees(sic) wooded area(sic), wooded area(sic) milieu boise(sic) zone boisee(unknown geometry). As the geographic information. community required access to these databases, organizations began the dissemination of their respective information to the general public and, as such, many countries have undertaken the development of Web infrastructures to simplify the access of geographic information. Also, interoperability of geographic information and processes has been developed since the nineties by standardization bodies (e.g. OpenGIS Consortium Inc., ISO/TC 211) as well as the research community as a solution to solve syntactic, structural, and semantic heterogeneities as well as spatial and temporal heterogeneities between geographic data sources. Recently, we have developed a new conceptual framework of geographic data interoperability based on cognitive sciences, the human communication process, and developments on ontologies. This paper describes the interoperability of geographic information from a human communication process account.