MAKOCI: A WEB PORTAL FOR INTEGRATING AND SHARING GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SERVICES

Abstract

The lack of integration and communication of various geographic information services (GI services) has resulted in many duplication collection of earth observation data, and challenges of semantic interoperability. This paper proposes an ontology-based multi-agents platform, called MAKOCI (multi-agent knowledge oriented cyberinfrastructure), which acts as GI service one stop to manage, publish, share, and discover GI services semantically. By ontologies, formal meanings of concepts are defined to annotate and discover GI services on a conceptual level for semantic interoperability. With the assistance of multi-agents, the processes in MAKOCI can be divided into various modules and be communicated based on the same semantics in ontologies. A prototype was implemented to test MAKOCI. Finally, we conclude the advantages and disadvantages of MAKOCI and point out several future works.

Keywords

• geographic information service, ontologies, multi-agent system, cyberinfrastructure