1 ONTOLOGY BASED SDI TO FACILITATE SPATIALLY ENABLED SOCIETY

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) development is moving more toward a user-centric platform to facilitate a decision-making in a spatially enabled society. A user-centric SDI pays more attention to user ’ preferences during data gathering and services (or/and infrastructure) designing. The first and second generations of SDI initiatives mainly are based on data-centric and process-based views. In the data-centric view, data are gathered and then services are designed based on data and finally the results are delivered to the users. But as this structure is not fully based on user's preferences, the user may not be happy using the services. In the user-centric view, users do necessarily need raw data but they need special data and services with respect to their preferences and needs. In order to facilitate this requirement ontologies are used to indicate a formally represented knowledge that is mainly used to improve data sharing and information retrieval in the user-centric SDI. Hence, the objective of this study is to develop an ontology based user-centric SDI using a route finding architecture as an example of spatial enablement to facilitate spatially enabled society. In this architecture, ontology facilitates SDI ’ services particularly the route finding analysis in a spatially enabled society