GeoMergeP: Supporting an Ontological Approach to Geographic Information Integration

Since 90's, several new approaches providing solutions to integrated or federated systems have been defined. In particular, with respect to geographic information systems, proposals of integration did not take long time to appear. However, applicability of many of those approaches is still unlikely. In this context, we introduce an ontology-based approach - the GeoMergeP system - aiming at improving the capabilities of the integration process. In this paper we propose a methodology composed of two main process, semantic enrichment (by adding information about the ISO 19100 standard) and merging. The last one performs some tasks automatically and guides the user in performing other tasks for which his/her intervention is required. Finally, a plugin of the ontology editor, Protege, is presented showing how the method is implemented through a case study.