Open Source and Open Standards for Using Integrated Geographic Data on the Web

Abstract

This article describes the first results of our research concerning the developement of a complete Open Source system based on W3C and ISO 19100 standards to integrate and manage spatial and non-spatial archaeological information on the Web. The system is based on MAD, a web tool originally developed to manage archaeological semantic datasets encoded in RDF using the CIDOC-CRM ontology. Geographic functions have been implemented to integrate spatial archaeological information for the management of unstructured documents, such as excavation diaries and reports, in a spatial context. The system will allow the creation and distribution of rich geospatial relationships across the Web and the use of geographic data in a Semantic Web scenario. The Geographic Markup Language (GML) has been used in our system to store geographic data related to archaeological records. GML information has been created using Open Source GIS software starting from vectorial data (.shp or .dxf). Brand new GML documents can be also created starting from non-spatial data. The advanced query system in MAD allows the creation of Semantic Web enriched data combining spatial and non-spatial information and using ontologies. Data serialized by the MAD system can be exported in SVG or visualized using map server web applications. The flexibility of GML features will also allow the implementation of complex query-on-map functions to visually query and generate dynamic maps. The tool can be also used to host and serialize KML archaeological files to be used in Google Earth and Google Maps applications