Using Web Services to enhance Geographic Information Systems

The paper describes an approach to the extension of geographic information systems to take advantage of the continuing development of capabilities of the Semantic Web. This is presented in the context of a portal based Geospatial Information Database (GIDB™), an object-oriented spatial database capable of storing multiple data types from multiple sources. The authors have developed their own approach for a specific domain, spatially oriented, meteorological and oceanographic, but this can clearly be applied to other spatial data domains. Finally, illustration is provided of the use of the ontology development system based on Generative Sublanguage Ontologies (GSO), a type of linguistic ontology inspired by the Generative Lexicon Theory, to develop effective domain ontologies.