Integration of spatial information sources based on source description framework

Recent progress of digital cartography and Internet technologies enabled new types of services on the network such as search engines that provide information within some specific geographic areas and retrieval services which allow map-oriented query interfaces. We call such services spatial information sources. In this paper, we propose a framework to integrate heterogeneous spatial information sources to provide an integrated view to users. Our main focus is heterogeneity of spatial information sources-since existing spatial information sources differ in their contents and query capabilities, integration of such sources requires an appropriate framework to describe their contents and query capabilities. In this paper, we show such a description framework and illustrate query processing strategies that utilize source descriptions of spatial information sources.