Abstract

Either the business model or the requirements of “Sustainable Development” has rendered collaboration indispensable today. Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) are widely accepted as the way of enabling collaboration among various parties. An SDI can be realized as an “interoperability infrastructure” which enables government, private sector, academia, and others involved to collaborate by allowing the usage of “data” and “services” of each other. Since there may be various parties involved, building and maintaining an SDI is an ambitious task. The two sub-infrastructures, “technological” and “institutional” ones of an SDI are need to be worked out. The interest of this work is to assess the potential of semantic web services (SWS) for the technological interoperability infrastructure of SDIs. For this aim, an SDI use case was implemented with SWS. It has been found that SWS are not mature enough yet for SDIs. However, they need to be researched further to be employed in the implementation of SDIs.

Key words: Spatial data infrastructures, semantic web services, interoperability, integrated coastal zone management.

Abbreviation

SWS, Semantic web services; SDIs, spatial data infrastructures; ICT, information and communication