Application Schema Mapping based on Ontology: An Approach for GML Storage

The heterogeneous nature of geospatial data makes them almost non-sharable across organization boundaries. As a standard means of geospatial data encoding, geography markup language (GML), an XML based data encoding standard, has been proposed by OGC. With the proliferation of GML in many geospatial application and support from the standard DBMS, the need arises for the efficient storage mechanism of GML data. This paper analyses approaches for XML data storage in traditional DBMS and finds alternatives for GML. We propose an approach for GML storage based on the analysis of the underlying application schema. A semi-automatic mapping mechanism is proposed for the application schema to relational schemas of standard database with the utilization of common concepts for the domain i.e. the domain ontology.