Virtual Hyperlinks in Geospatial Datasources

With the proliferation of GIS data and resources over the Internet, there is an increasing demand for robust geospatial information services that allow interoperation of massive repositories of heterogeneous spatial data and metadata. The purpose of this paper is to show how mediation - a data integration technique - can help in building a transparent Web-based access to geospatial data. The mediator virtually creates hyperlinks between its global schema and local sources ones. This technique has been fully implemented in the context of a geographic mediation/wrapper system that provides an integrated view of the data together with a spatial query language