The Semantic Web o?ers new options for information processes. Dr. Visser is dealing with twocore issuesin this area:the integrationofdata onthe sem- tic level and the problem of spatio-temporalrepresentation and reasoning. He tackles existing research problems within the ?eld of geographic information systems(GIS), thesolutionsofwhichareessentialfor animprovedfunction- ity of applicationsthat makeuse of the Semantic Web (e.g., for heterogeneous digitalmaps).Inaddition,theyareoffundamentalsigni?canceforinformation sciences as such. In an introductory overview of this ?eld of research, he motivates the - cessity for formal metadata for unstructured information in the World Wide Web. Without metadata, an e?cient search on a semantic level will turn out to be impossible, above all if it is not only applied to a terminological level but also to spatial-temporal knowledge. In this context, the task of infor- tionintegrationisdividedinto syntactic,structural,andsemanticintegration, the last class by far the most di?cult, above all with respect to contextual semantic heterogeneities. A current overview of the state of the art in the ?eld of information in- gration follows. Emphasis is put particularly on the representation of spatial and temporal aspects including the corresponding inference mechanisms, and also the special requirements on the Open GIS Consortium.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
and Related Work.- Related Work.- The Buster Approach for Terminological, Spatial, and Temporal Representation and Reasoning.- General Approach of Buster.- Terminological Representation and Reasoning, Semantic Translation.- Spatial Representation and Reasoning.- Temporal Representation and Reasoning.- Implementation, Conclusion, and Future Work.- Implementation Issues and System Demonstration.- Conclusion and Future Work.- References.