A holistic, semantics-aware approach to Spatial Data Infrastructures

We present a novel approach to the management of Spatial Data Infrastrutures that leverages semantics-aware context information to model the distinct aspects involved in the management of geospatial data. RDF-based schemata are employed for encoding information about the user community, the terminologies in use in a specific research domain, gazetteer information representing the physical landscape underpinning data and, last but not least, resource metadata. The data structures are then interconnected to enable seamless exploita- tion for metadata creation and resource discovery, which we demonstrate through a worked-out example of SPARQL query on RDF graph data. The methodology is being applied by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) to support creation of a distributed infrastructure for marine data in the context of the RITMARE Flagship Project.