Integrating geospatial web resources based on semantic web technology

With the advance of World-Wide Web (WWW) technology, Web resources can be efficiently transmitted acrossthe widely-distributed Internet network. Among the vast number of Web resources, many of them includegeographic attributes, where the collection of these resources forms the Geospatial Web (GeoWeb). The discoveryand integration of GeoWeb resources are the important research directions in the WebGIS field. However, GeoWebresources are distributed on the Internet and provided by different individuals or organizations, which cause seriousheterogeneity issues. For users to find targeted GeoWeb resources efficiently, these heterogeneity issues need tobe addressed. Among the heterogeneity issues, one of them is the semantic heterogeneity. An example of thesemantic heterogeneity is using different words to represent the same concept or vice versa. Another problem oflacking semantic integration is that the relationships between resources will be hidden from users, where relatedresources cannot be discovered. Therefore, this study aims at addressing the semantic heterogeneity issue of theGeoWeb resources. To be specific, this research applies the semantic web technology to represent the metadatainformation of each resource. By describing resources in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format basedon a designed GeoWeb resource ontology, semantic relationships between resources can be inferred and queried.Consequently, the proposed solution can integrate GeoWeb resources and facilitate the GeoWeb resource discovery.