II Collaborative Research: Information Integration for Locating and Querying Geospatial Data

Nancy Wiegand (UW-Madison) and Isabel Cruz (U of IL at Chicago)

The objective of this proposal is to provide semantic integration over diverse geospatial data to enable locating and querying data sets distributed over the Web. Work includes metadata integration methods to enable more precise location of data sources as well as resolving diverse geospatial data models. Our goal is to provide methods and tools to support the semantic integration of geospatial data to enable analyses and decision-making for various applications such as emergency response. Our vision is for a Web-based geospatial information system that uses ontologies so that a user can precisely locate data sources that were described in heterogeneous metadata terms, the user can query over the content of multiple heterogeneous data sources, and, ultimately, a Web application can be designed to automatically locate and query data sources using the ontology methodology.