A Layered Ontology-Based Architecture for Integrating Geographic Information

Architectural Solutions to information integration have extensively appeared during the last years, mostly from the federated system research field. Some of these solutions were created to deal with geographic information, whose inherent features make the integration process particularly complex. Among others, the use of ontologies has been proposed as a way of supporting an automated integration. However, how to specify and use a geographic ontology is not so clear in this context. In this paper, we introduce in ontology-based architectural solution as an extension of a, federated system (Information Broker) built by the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT). Our extension is aimed at improving integration by adding semantic features through the use of ontologies and the ISO 19100 standards.