March 29, 2011 – Taiwan GIS Center — the country’s “think tank” and formerly known as the China Data Processing Center — is developing a web-based spatial decision support system on the Government Cloud, which would enable the central and local government, private industries, and the general public to access spatial information through various media.
FutureGov brought this news to our attention in their article, “Taiwan develops Spatial Decision Support System.” The goal of this project is to enable better reusing, sharing, and managing of spatial information. They are proposing an ontology-enabled problem solving framework based on semantic interoperability and knowledge sharing to enable a web-based SDSS. The framework would include four components:
- geospatial ontologies enabling domain experts to contribute knowledge and models for reuse and sharing,
- an ontology registry allowing web service providers to register GI services into ontologies,
- a web portal where domain experts can evaluate results and SDSS developers can find solutions for specific geospatial problems, and
- an ontologies engine to infer relevant registered GI services based on the knowledge in the ontologies in response to a geospatial problem submitted in the web portal.
Melody K. Smith
