Uncertainty in Distributed and Interoperable Spatial Information Systems
Maria A. Cobb, Harold Foley, Frederick E. Petry, Kevin Shaw · Studies in fuzziness and soft computing · 2000
Many facets of spatial data representation inherently involve issues of accuracy and uncertainty. This problem is greatly magnified when considering the integration of spatial data from different sources, such as in a distributed or interoperable environment. The general concept, of schema merging Involves the resolution of incompatibilities as in a distributed environment. These may be either structural or semantic in nature. Structural incompatibilities involve those, for example, in which attributes for representing the same values arc tie-fined differently. Semantic incompatibilities, however, represent those cases in which similarly defined attributes have different meanings or values For example, an attribute of WIDTH for a road in one database may include the widih of associated accca lanes, while in anoiltei database it may be only the main drive able portion of the road. Such semantic issues are much more difficult to resolve, as they require a fleeper understanding oi ute data. We will survey tnc issues as diwussed above for spatial data in such environments and describe several approaches lor different aspects of the data using furry set techniques lo deal with the incompatibilities.