Enterprise Geographic Information System (E-GIS): A Service-based Architecture for Geo-spatial Data Interoperability

Geo-spatial data is increasingly becoming a key element for effective planning and decision-making in a variety of application domains. This has generated the need of sharing the spatial data repositories, collected/maintained by diverse organizations mostly for their own application domain. Enterprise geographic information system (E-GIS) is an organization-wide approach to GIS implementation, operation and management of these diverse spatial data repositories. The main focus of the paper is to propose an architecture for integrating diverse spatial data repositories for geographic applications using a service oriented architecture (SOA). The proposed architecture uses a central ontology of data repositories for seamless query processing across heterogeneous data sources. The ontology can be viewed as defining a database of objects, connected by roles, which will help in interpreting the semantics of users' request. Two level ontology namely, domain and application ontology is used for understanding and matchmaking the requests with services. The working principle of service-based discovery and retrieval mechanism has been incorporated in the integrated system.