SEMANTIC AND GEOMETRIC INTEGRATION OF GEOSCIENTIFIC DATA SETS WITH ATKIS – APPLIED TO GEO-OBJECTS FROM GEOLOGY AND SOIL SCIENCE

Solving problems in an environmental or geoscientific domain usually involves various data from different sources: Typically, not all the data is available in one dataset, but is distributed, has different formats, and different thematic focus. Data integration is therefore needed for the combination and analysis of different data sets. The project “Geotechnologien – New methods for semantic and geometric integration of geoscientific data sets with ATKIS – applied to geo-objects from geology and soil science” funded by the German Ministry of Research investigates different aspects of data integration and aims at developing methods for automatic integration from different data-sets and their consistent management in a federated data base. Three different vector data sets are used in the project: the topographic data set ATKIS, the geological map and the soil science map. The topographic component of the geological and the soil science map is based on topographic maps, but the frequency of update differs between ATKIS and the geoscience maps. Thus, the data sets differ not only in thematic content, but also referring to seemingly identical topographic objects. In the first step of the project the objects and their semantics in the different data sets are investigated in detail, the object water will be the first very promising candidate for identifying the conformity between the different data sets. In the second step, a geometric reconciliation will be established. To this end, firstly corresponding objects will be identified using matching procedures. The identified objects from the geoscientific maps will be adapted to the reference objects from ATKIS. Following this procedure the automatic change detection shows all the differences between the reference data set and the data sets to be integrated.