Geospatial Ontology Trade Study

It has been estimated that up to 80% of all information contains some notion of location. This is helping create a greater understanding of the utility of geospatial information as a framework for organizing, portraying and better understanding other information and the relationships of people, places, things and events. Geospatial capabilities are entering the mainstream of information technology and spatial data infrastructures (SDI's) are being implemented to bring together the technologies, policies, standards, and human resources to better utilize geospatial data. SDI's such as the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) are using a standards baseline of ISO, Open Geospatial Consortium and other relevant consensus standards and putting service oriented architectures in place to achieve distributed, data-centric, net-centric operations. This stage of development of SDI's is bringing an unprecedented level of interoperability to geospatial data and technology and is setting the stage for an even greater level of future interoperability and data integration. The development of geospatial ontologies and semantic capabilities for integrating well structured geospatial data with unstructured geospatial information existing in other data sets will be the catalyst for this next major step forward.