A semantic geodatabase for environment analysis: Extraction, management and sharing of earth and water information in GIS

The great potential of GIS to manage and analyse georeferenced information is well-known. The last several years of development of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) saw a necessity of interoperability arise, from which the Semantic web standards and domain ontologies are derived. Specific application field ontologies are often insufficient for representing the information of multidisciplinary projects. Moreover, they are often aimed at the representation of homogeneous data formats (alphanumeric data, vector spatial data, raster spatial data, etc.). In this scenario, traditional GIS often have a limit: they implement personal data models, which are very difficult to exchange through different systems. In this study we structured a GIS for the monitoring project ALCOTRA ALIRHYS according to parts of two different self-integrated ontologies, from the perspective of the major interoperability of the system and the sharing of data through a web-GIS platform. The two standard models chosen (SWEET ontology and INSPIRE UML model) have been integrated in a unique conceptual model useful both for geometric and cartographic data, and for thematic information. In this case, the implemented schemas are published on the project website, and are available for other users who want to produce similar studies. Since user-friendly results were desirable, some integrated commercial widespread software programs have been used even if their abilities to manage such a GIS are suboptimal.