Using Federated Catalogs to Improve Semantic Integration among Spatial Data Infrastructures
Fabio Gomes de Andrade, Cláudio de Souza Baptista, Fábio Luiz Leite · Transactions in GIS · 2011
Abstract Nowadays, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) play an important role in government agencies, at different levels: global, national, and local. They aim to improve the management and sharing of geospatial data. Nonetheless, these SDIs have been developed as information islands, in which a user's query is compared to metadata described only in their own catalog services. The lack of interaction among SDIs limits the potential of these infrastructures in providing geospatial data to a larger audience. This article presents a distributed architecture, based on a federation of SDIs which interact among themselves, using query propagation. This propagation facilitates data discovery and sharing. We also describe a distributed query processing service used to enable the resource discovery in distributed infrastructures.