A Knowledge-based Collaborative Environment for Geovisualization: Ontologies for Multiple Perspectives on Distributed Data Resources

This paper contributes to the theme 'connecting people, data and resources' of the ICA research agenda on visualization and virtual environments. It focuses on the semantic capabilities required to enable sharing of distributed, disparate data resources within a geo-scientific community. The paper presents the rationale for underlying semantics to be integrated into the interface in a computational environment where the data are multidimensional and the geovisualization requirements open-ended. The concept of ontological hierarchies in space, time and scientific dimensions is presented using illustrative examples. The conceptual design of the interface and the architecture of the prototype system are described and examples presented. The paper also mentions other scientific visualization systems and reflects upon the underlying issues and problems.