A short paper that we have submitted today as part of the 52° North semantics community (update: it has been accepted for the EuroSSC 2009).

Abstract Based on abstract reference models, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has established standards for the storage, retrieval, and processing of geographical information. These standards act as groundwork for the implementation of concrete services and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Research on geo-semantics plays an increasing role to support complex queries and discovery across heterogeneous information sources, as well as for on-the-fly integration and semantic translation. So far, existing approaches only target individual solutions or focus on the Semantic Web, leaving the integration into SDI aside. What is missing is a common semantic enablement layer on top of spatial data infrastructures which also integrates reasoning services from the semantic web. Focusing on Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) we outline how spatial data infrastructures can benefit from such semantic enablement layer.

Krzysztof Janowicz, Carsten Keßler, Arne Bröring, and Christoph Stasch. Towards Semantic Enablement for Spatial Data Infrastructures