Overcoming semantic heterogeneity in spatial data infrastructures

Geo-Enrichment and Semantic Enhancement of Metadata Sets to Augment Discovery in Geoportals

“…Various authors [3,12,13] have noted the challenges about semantic interoperability and semantic heterogeneity. In that sense, semantic heterogeneity refers to the "disagreement about the meaning, interpretation or intended use of the same or related data" [14].…”

“…In contrast to syntactic interoperability, semantic interoperability deals with the actual meaning of elements [3]. Due to the reason that people interpret the same information in a different way, "detecting and solving semantic heterogeneity are difficult problems" [12].…”

“…Lutz et al [3] distinguish between three levels of semantic heterogeneity. Semantic heterogeneity occurs at the metadata level (regarding "discovery of geographic information"), at the schema level (concerning the "retrieval of geographic information"), and at the data content level ("interpretation, integration and exchange of geographic information").…”

“…Currently, searching for geographic information in geoportal implementations is based on querying title, abstract, and keyword metadata sections in combination with spatial and temporal filters. As keywords are inherently restricted by the ambiguities of natural languages, semantic heterogeneity problems arise [3]. Especially when dealing with multiple languages, conflicts arise due to various interpretations of features depending on social and cultural background [4].…”

“…In order to overcome semantic heterogeneity problems, the usage of (multilingual) thesauri and ontologies has been widely proposed as a possible solution [3,13]. According to Gruber [22], the term ontology has been defined as a "formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization".…”