An integrated metamodel for knowledge representation in geolibraries

Geolibraries containing large volumes of complex spatiotemporal data occur in a variety of application domains. Considerable effort has gone into the design of metadata standards to enable exchange and sharing of georeferenced data sets. Strategies for federating information stores have to deal with integration at several levels, syntax, structure as well as semantics. This paper describes a generic metamodel for geolibraries. It encompasses a conceptually partitioned view of the data space including metadata at various levels of a geolibrary. The model places particular emphasis on ontologies representing domain-dependent knowledge that exists within a research community to facilitate resource discovery and retrieval of information from heterogeneous data stores.