Spatial querying supported by domain and user ontologies: An approach for web GIS applications

Geographic data on the Web has intensely increased in recent years. As a consequence, several applications that allow the search of Geographic Information (GI) on the Web have emerged, such as geographic web services, geographic search engines, Web GIS, etc. Till recently, most of research on GI management on the Web was focused on the storage, handling and Web mapping of GI by relying on keywords based query for searching. Nevertheless, GI specific characteristics, and web-user needs, require the development of novel web search methodologies. This paper focuses on spatial web-querying, which, integrated in a Web GIS context, allows retrieving relevant layers of interest that meet user needs. A layer is composed of objects that pertain to the same semantic domain, for example, roads and bridges may compose a transportation network theme. By exploiting the semantic characterization of each layer, in order to retrieve them, we propose in this paper a querying approach empowered by the use of ontologies, which are currently at the heart of many applications of Knowledge Engineering, especially the Semantic Web. A web GIS application prototype, has been developed by using a variety of open GIS software; this prototype is dedicated to the touristic geographic urban domain, and it exemplifies the proposed approach.