Retrieving geospatial information into a Web-mapping application using geospatial ontologies

Many types of information are geographically referenced and interactive maps provide a natural user interface to such data. However, the process to access and retrieve geospatial data presents several problems related to heterogeneity and interoperability of the geospatial information. Thus, information integration and semantic heterogeneity are not trivial tasks. Therefore, we propose a web-mapping system focused on retrieving geospatial information by means of geospatial ontologies and representing this information on the Internet. Moreover, a Multi-Agent System is proposed to deal with the process related to obtain the tourist geo-information, which aids in the information-integration task for several nodes (geographic sites) that are involved in this application. The agent system provides the mechanism to communicate different distributed and heterogeneous Geographic Information Systems and retrieves the data by means of GML description. Also, this paper proposes an interoperability approach based on geospatial ontologies matching that is performed by the Multi-Agent System in each node considered in the application. The retrieval mechanism is based on encoding the information in a GML description to link each geospatial data with a concept of the ontologies that have been proposed.