ITcon Vol. 13, pg. 39-55, http://www.itcon.org/2008/3

CAD and GIS interoperability through semantic web services

submitted:August 2007
revised:January 2008
published:February 2008
editor(s):Ruikar K
authors:Burcu Akinci, Associate Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
email: bakinci@cmu.edu

Hassan Karimi, Associate Professor
School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
email: hkarimi@mail.sis.pitt.edu

Anu Pradhan, PhD Student
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
email: pradhan@cmu.edu

Cheng-Chien Wu, Graduate Student
School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
email: chengchienwu@gmail.com

Greg Fichtl, Graduate Student
School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
email: gjf8@pitt.edu
summary:Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Geographical Information System (GIS) are being used in tandem to support a variety of decisions throughout the life cycle of civil infrastructure systems. Existing CAD and GIS platforms have been developed independently with different purposes resulting in significant differences in terms of data formats they support, terminology they utilize, semantics of concepts they represent, and reasoning techniques on which they are based. For this reason, existing CAD and GIS platforms are currently not interoperable, resulting in wasted time and money due to limitations associated with exchange of data and knowledge. Within the context of this paper, we highlight a set of interoperability challenges associated with CAD and GIS platforms and describe a web-service based approach that will enable semantic interoperability between these two platforms. The paper specifically discusses research challenges associated with different components of such a proposed semantic web-based approach; namely task decomposition, ontology identification, web service discovery and matching, and service composition.
keywords:semantic web services, CAD-GIS, interoperability, web service composition, automated planning, web service discovery
full text: (PDF file, 0.487 MB)
citation:Akinci B, Karimi H, Pradhan A, Wu C-C, Fichtl G (2008). CAD and GIS interoperability through semantic web services, ITcon Vol. 13, pg. 39-55, https://www.itcon.org/2008/3