Ownership definition and instances integration in highly coupled Spatial Data Infrastructures

Building and maintaining Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) in large networks of public bodies is a great challenge, in particular for European countries since the INSPIRE project has become a EU directive in the last months. However, SDIs can have different goals and thus different requirements depending on which type of processes they aim to serve. In this paper we consider a highly coupled SDI where different actors join the SDI at different times, and each actor is responsible for providing geographical data during the joining phase and for maintaining them updated afterwards. The main result is the definition and the experimental validation of an SDI architecture where the well-known problems of conflation and semantic harmonization can be approached in a consistent way; moreover, two less-evident problems, called instance integration and ownership definition are precisely identified and integrated in the same architecture.