An Approach for Geospatial Data Management for Efficient Web Retrieval

The heterogeneous nature of geospatial data makes them almost non-sharable over the web. Geography Markup Language (GML), an XML based data encoding standard, has been proposed by OGC for storing, transporting of geospatial data over the web. With the proliferation of GML in many geospatial application and support from the standard DBMS, the need arises for the efficient storage mechanism of GML data. This paper analyses approaches for XML data storage in traditional DBMS and its extension to GML. We propose an approach for GML storage based on the analysis of the underlying application schema. A semi-automatic mapping mechanism is proposed for the application schema to relational schemas of standard database with the utilization of common concepts for the domain i.e. the ontology of the domain. This enhances the web retrieval of geospatial data by bringing semantics among the data sources.