Software Agent-Oriented Frameworks for the Interoperability of Georeferenced Digital Libraries on the World Wide Web: The Sigal Project

Within an organization managing spatially referenced data, several types of documents are used to describe the land and its resources (for instance, topographic maps, land use maps, aerial photographs, satellite images, and so on). Managing such documents is a complex task, each document being characterized by its own content, spatial reference system, quality, sources, mode of distribution, and format. Hence, Georeferenced Digital Libraries (GDLs) can be very useful and helpful to describe the available geodocument resources in an organization. For instance, GDLs provide information about the physical location of the documents and identify who does what, when, and how. GDLs are nowadays implemented on the World Wide Web (WWW), mostly to facilitate the distribution of spatial data; these are the GDLs of interest for the present chapter although the research is not limited to the WWW.