Flexible Querying of Imperfect Temporal Metadata in Spatial Data Infrastructures

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) allow users connected to the Internet to share and access remote and distributed heterogeneous geodata that are managed by their providers at their own Web sites. In SDIs, available geodata can be found via standard discovery geo-services that makes available query facilities of a metadata catalog. By expressing precise selection conditions on the values of the metadata collected in the catalog, the user can discover interesting and relevant geodata and then access them by means of the services of the SDI. An important dimension of geodata that often concerns such users’ requests is the temporal information that can have multiple semantics. Current practice to perform geodata discovery in SDIs is inadequate for several reasons. First of all, with respect to the temporal characterization, available recommendations for metadata specification, for example, the INSPIRE Directive of the European community do not consider the multiple semantics of the temporal metadata. To this aim, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-475-2.ch006