Review of semantic enablement techniques used in geospatial and semantic standards for legacy and opportunistic mashups

Lefort, L.

Networks of sensors are increasingly used to monitor essential environmental variables for biodiversity, water, and climate change research. Such multidisciplinary scientific projects require more flexible ways to publish and aggregate sensor observations from different networks as mashable web resources. Semantically enabled and linkable descriptions of sensors and sensors services can simplify the integration of legacy backend sensor web services and make it easier for mashup developers to opportunistically combine these resources. This paper reviews linking and annotation techniques applicable to the development of geospatial mashups services. It describes how approaches based on RDFa could supersede existing techniques for the semantic annotation of RESTful services. It highlights specific issues linked to the hybrid nature of mashups combining solutions based on XML, RDF and HTML standards and the failure risks attached to such multi-standards knowledge systems. It points out the pending technical issues, especially the ones where more coherent approaches are needed e.g. the upgrade of existing standards like XLink and SAWSDL or the integration of validation tools developed for each family of standards.

Cite as: Lefort, L. (2009). Review of semantic enablement techniques used in geospatial and semantic standards for legacy and opportunistic mashups. In Proc. Australasian Ontology Workshop 2009 (AOW 2009) Melbourne, Australia. CRPIT, 112. Meyer, T. and Taylor, K. Eds., ACS. 17-26

(from crpit.com) (local if available)