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Geospatial Semantic Integration

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Encyclopedia of GIS

Synonyms

Interoperability; Semantic Web; Ontology; Similarity, semantic; Features, linguistic; Features, Physical; Similarity discovery; Similarity Representation; Category, geographic; RDF; OWL; Geospatial semantics

Definition

Semantics refers to the meaning of symbols such as words, graphs, and other representations that are employed to describe a real-world object. A geospatial object is defined with its spatial distribution and its attributes. Geospatial semantics indicate the meaning of geospatial terms as attributes of geospatial objects. Geospatial semantic integration provides a global view of diverse terms in different data sources. For example, a geospatial object is described as a river in one data source and a water body in another source; geospatial semantic integration reveals that the two terms fundamentally mean the same thing in the real world and merge them into a single term such as water body.

Historical Background

Semantic integration, as one task of data...

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Recommended Reading

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag

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Zhou, N. (2008). Geospatial Semantic Integration. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35973-1_511

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