Toward user oriented semantic geographical information systems

Abstract

User Oriented Geographical Information Systems, a recent adaptation of classical GIS concepts to everyday usage, are becoming more and more present in the web landscape. Recent developments show the need of adding higher semantic levels to the existing frameworks, to improve their usage, as well as to ease scalability. We point out limits of actual examples, related to handling heterogeneous data, scalability issues, and expressiveness, and suggest a framework for building a Semantic User Oriented GIS. Notably this framework aims to address the peculiarities of the geographical space domain, and to offer a cognitively sound interface to the user