Connecting ISO and OGC Models to the Semantic Web
Florian Probst, Fernando Gibotti, Andres Pazos Miguel Angel Esbri, Marcello Benigno, Mariella Gutiérrez, Werner Kuhn
OGC and ISO have developed extensive standards for geospatial applications, providing well-founded definitions of concepts related to the geospatial domain. Currently these standards are available in textual descriptions supported by UML static structure diagrams, giving guidance to developers to implement applications. However, in an open and distributed environment, the possibility to assess the interoperability of applications and data sources without human intervention is becoming increasingly important. The current forms of representations hinder this attempt since UML is designed for model building and sharing by human experts.
We propose to enforce the efforts to include such standards in the framework of the semantic web. This would leverage investment into these standardization efforts by opening sophisticated domain models to a wide range of potential users. The paper shows a first attempt at capturing the contents of some key ISO and OGC standards in a standard web ontolo gy environment. We propose OWL as a candidate representation language since it is designed to provide guidance for intelligent processing methods (Falkovych, Sabou et al. 2003).