Interoperability of Geographic Information: A Communication Process –Based Prototype

Jean Brodeur

Since 1990, municipal, state/provincial, and federal governments have developed numerous geographic databases over the years to fulfill organizations’ specific needs. As such, same real world topographic phenomena have been abstracted differently, for instance vegetation (surface), trees (surface), wooded area (line), wooded area (point and line), milieu boisé (surface), zone boisée (unknown geometry). Today, information about these geographic phenomena is accessible on the Internet from Web infrastructures specially developed to simplify their access. Early in the nineties, the development of interoperability of geographic information has been undertaken to solve syntactic, structural, and semantic heterogeneities as well as spatial and temporal heterogeneities to facilitate sharing and integration of such data. Recently, we have proposed a new conceptual framework for interoperability of geographic information based on the human communication process, cognitive science, and ontology, and introduced geosemantic proximity, a reasoning methodology to qualify dynamically the semantic similarity between geographic abstractions. This framework could be of interest to other disciplines. This paper presents the details of our framework for interoperability of geographic information as well as a prototype.

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