Spatial Knowledge Infrastructure (SKI) expands the current spatial data infrastructure model to a model that creates an autonomous network of data, analytics, expertise and policies that assists end users to integrate spatial knowledge in real-time. In such an SKI, data and knowledge must be exposed for the semantic web by which the data and processes become discoverable by search engines and can be queried by dedicated machines.
Many organizations acquire data about the same real world object in varied context (e.g. a shopping centre for ‘cadastre’ is not the same as a shopping centre for the fire department). Moreover, each agency believes that their information is the best and is unwilling to compromise on their perception of what is truth.
Many applications require distributed authoritative spatial data to be joined, either because activities occur at borders, or a uniform view of data is required. The required syntactic and semantic harmonization can be done in various locations in an information architecture. Due to the jurisdictions having different spatial data schemas and formats, database interoperability is an issue.
