Model semantic network for massive spatial information

Spatial information is now increasing continuously and is available via the Internet. But facing the abundant spatial information, people recognize many agonizing problems, such as how can spatial information cooperate with each other to solve users' task and how do users know where spatial information is located, what kinds of spatial information can be used, and the way of how to use them. The only way to remedy those problems is to use spatial metadata. Spatial metadata is the description of spatial information and its associated information, which give a semantic expatiation for spatial information. Spatial metadata is now developed as an indispensable and powerful tool for data finding, data exchanging, data managing and data utilization. Currently, there are some standards for spatial metadata such as FGDC and ISO/TC211. But the existing spatial metadata is largely for people to use, and only describes spatial information itself. In this paper, spatial metadata is extended to describe the relations among different spatial information and the distribution of spatial information on the Internet. Based on the extensive spatial metadata, a semantic network model for massive spatial information is presented to support the collaboration among spatial information and make the navigation of spatial information more fast and exact. At last, XML technology is adopted to represent the semantic network for spatial information.