What does it mean interoperability in
Geographical Information Science?
by
Lucia Lovison-Golob, March, 2003
In a distributed digital network,
interoperability refers to the way we communicate with one another,
with data and machines. The advancement of geospatial technologies
such as GPS (Global Positioning Satellites), and geographical information
systems, combined with the semantic web, mobile computing and computational
grids has de facto thrust geographical information science (GIS) out
of its niche and into the broader information infrastructure.
GIS, with its capacity to manage
location-based, multimedia data, offers both the theoretical foundation
and the software-hardware tools for visualizing and managing complex
systems and organizations across different disciplines and institutions,
at national and global levels.
One of the major hurdles, the lack
of geospatial standards among different software and hardwares, have
slowly been overcome through the constructive activities of organizations
such as the Open GIS Consortium (OGC), the International Organization
for Standardization (ISO), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), as well as the active participation
of the geospatial industry and governmental agencies.
Within the Internet, there has
been a shift from server-based applications that serve data to web
based applications that serve services (called web services), such
as MapQuest, depending on
the needs of an organization or user.
Harvard University, as part of
the geospatial community, is also embracing open standards promoted
by OGC within an interoperable framework for discovery, access, integration,
analysis and visualization of geodata on the web. Through an interoperable
geospatial web, we will be able to share critical information across
different users and domains.
Ultimately, the boundary between
the virtual and physical worlds will disappear.
Examples of OGC Web Mapping
Servers based on Boston datasets are
iBoston,
iBoston_ocean,
iBoston_ocean Interactive,
Boston,
and a demo from
Itasca location, in Minnesota. Others, such as the
Boston_inout
,
have a spatial mapping service that is located in
another server and vendor-based, in our case powered by Geomedia Web
Professional v. 5.0, able to dynamically serve a map over the internet
and to communicate with other mapping service. Others will soon come
online. This site represents work in progress.
