THE GEOSPATIAL SEMANTIC WEB Are GIS Catalogs prepared for This?

Geospatial information catalogs are complex infrastructures that store and publish geographic information. They are an important part of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), systems that manage geospatial data for a wide variety of application domains. To be useful, a catalog must efficiently support discovery and retrieval of geospatial information, working as a key component for planning and decision-making in a variety of domains. Catalogs use standards to support data interoperability. However, the simple adoption of standards and specifications for geospatial data description enables only syntactic interoperability. Semantic heterogeneity still presents challenges for the so-called Geospatial Semantic Web. This work discusses some features that GIS catalogs should have, focusing in semantic issues. We tested some existing and well known catalogs, comparing them by means of these features. Based on this comparison, we identified some open issues that should be addressed considering advanced Geospatial applications on the Web.