Ontological and Semantic Technologies for Geospatial Portals

Abstract

A geospatial portal is a repository of distributed geospatial data, tools and services, and supports the publishing, management, search, use and sharing of the resources. Geospatial portals have been developed as clearinghouses, metadata portals, data warehousing, and recently geospatial portals incorporated the Service Oriented Architecture and distributed computing to make service-oriented portals. In addition to software and computational challenges, ontology and semantics play an increasingly important role in geospatial portals due to the demand of interoperability. The interoperation and communication of data, tools and services become critical when heterogeneous resources are consolidated and exchanged on geospatial portals. This chapter provides an updated overview of geospatial portals followed by detailed discussion on how the ontological and semantic technologies are incorporated into geospatial portals. Three recent research and practice of geospatial portals are briefly introduced as the case studies of service-oriented portals.