A Linked Data Approach for Geospatial Data Provenance

Geospatial data provenance records sources and processing steps that are used in deriving geospatial data products. In the Web of Data environment enabled by Linked Data technologies, sources and processing steps, such as geospatial data and geoprocessing services, can be published as part of the Web of Data. To take full advantages of the machine-understandable format and linkages among heterogeneous data items in the Web of Data, this paper proposes to publish geospatial data provenance into the Web of Data. In particular, it analyzes how a catalogue for provenance, i.e., geospatial data provenance managed by a geospatial metadata catalog service, can be published into the Web of Data using a Linked Data approach. Consequently, queries over linked geospatial data provenance are analyzed and tested to demonstrate the benefits of the approach.