Querying Heterogeneous Land Use Data: Problems and Potential

The proposed Wisconsin Land Information System (WLIS) will be a statewide access mechanism for land related data. It will be a distributed Web-based system with heterogeneous data residing on local and state servers. One of the most important functions for WLIS is to integrate land use data across jurisdictions to enable decision-making for comprehensive land use planning. Here, we describe the semantic problems of integrating land use codes. We then present the current state of our enhancements to an XML query engine to provide query processing over heterogeneous data sets. We also briefly describe the integration of XML databases based on a declaratively specified mapping from each database to a central and expert-defined authority.