DM-79 - U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure

Spatial data infrastructures may be thought of as socio-technical frameworks for coordinating the development, management, sharing and use of geospatial data across multiple organizational jurisdictions and varying geographic extents. The United States was an early adopter of the SDI concept and the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) is an example of a country-wide SDI implementation facilitated by coordination at the federal-government level. At the time of its establishment in the early 1990s, a unique characteristic of the NSDI was a mandate for federal agencies to establish partnerships with state- and local-level government. This entry summarizes the origins of the NSDI’s establishment, its original core components and how they’ve evolved over the last 25 years, the role of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), and the anticipated impact of passage of the Geospatial Data Act of 2018. For broader technical information about SDIs, readers are referred to GIST BoK Entry DM-60: Spatial Data Infrastructures (Hu and Li 2017). For additional details on the history of the NSDI, readers are referred to Rhind (1999). For the latest information on recent and emerging NSDI initiatives, please visit the FGDC web site (www.fgdc.gov).
DM-80 - Ontology for Geospatial Semantic Interoperability
It is difficult to share and reuse geospatial data and retrieve geospatial information because of geospatial data heterogeneity problems. Lack of semantic interoperability is one of the major problems facing GIS (Geographic Information Science/System) systems and applications today. To solve geospatial data heterogeneity problems and support geospatial information retrieval and semantic interoperability over the Web, the use of an ontology is proposed because it is a formal explicit description of concepts or meanings of words in a well-defined and unambiguous manner. Geospatial ontologies represent geospatial concepts and properties for use over the Web. OWL (Ontology Web Language) is an emerging language for defining and instantiating ontologies. OWL builds on RDF (Resource Description Framework) but adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes. The downside of representing structured geospatial data in OWL and RDF languages is that it can result in inefficient data access. SPARQL (Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language) is recommended for general RDF query while the GeoSPARQL (Geographic Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language) protocol is proposed as an extension of SPARQL for querying geospatial data. However, the runtime cost of GeoSPARQL queries can be high due to the fine-grained nature of RDF data models. There are several challenges to using ontologies for geospatial semantic interoperability but these can be overcome through collaboration.