Using Web Services to enhance Geographic Information Systems

In this paper we describe an approach to the extension of geographic information systems to take advantage of the continuing development of capabilities of the Semantic Web. This is presented in the context of a portal based Geospatial Information Database (GIDB (TM)), an object-oriented spatial database capable of storing multiple data types from multiple sources. We have developed our approach for a specific domain, spatially oriented, meteorological and oceanographic, but this can clearly be applied to other spatial data domains. Finally we illustrate the use of the ontology development system based on Generative Sublanguage Ontologies (GSO), a type of linguistic ontology inspired by the Generative Lexicon Theory, to develop effective domain ontologies.