Integrating GI with non-GI services—showcasing interoperability in a heterogeneous service-oriented architecture

The concept of a service-oriented architecture provides a technical foundation for delivering, using, and integrating software. It can serve as an approach to integrate GIS with other, non-GIS applications. This paper presents and discusses a service-oriented architecture that embraces a GIS and an enterprise resource planning system. The two information systems make mutually required functionalities available as services. This defines the showcase for making GI and non-GI services syntactically and semantically interoperable. The services-based integration leverages open-standard interfacing and, thus, removes syntactic heterogeneity. The integration is discussed in terms of an emergency management scenario. This scenario also helps to outline challenging semantic interoperability issues. When services provided by GIS and non-GIS applications interact, the problem arises how their different conceptualizations should be mapped. This paper analyzes essential ontological distinctions for mapping conceptual schemes in GI locator services and non-GI services. It proposes a hybrid decentralized approach of concept mapping, based on a common top-level ontology.