A distributed and cooperative semantic system for geographic information management

The aim of this paper is to present a novel implementation of a distributed and cooperative system to manage geographic information for rational use and planning of landscape resources. The system is being developed for the diverging needs of heterogeneous and distributed communities. It is strongly based on standard Semantic Web technologies and computational ontologies for the organisation of knowledge. This enables data sharing and interoperability among different applications and users communities. In addiction, the proposed system uses geographical information advanced technologies and supports specific data editors and visualisers to edit and show different kind of geographic data. The presented tool is based on a customised version of the DBin platform which provides facilities to structure information in according to the Semantic Web standards but also dedicated tools for data-browsing, data-retrieval and exchanging. Moreover, the system provides an intelligent and flexible query engine, a completly customizable user interface and tools for "semantic annotations".