The Application of Geography Markup Language(GML) to the Maritime Information

This paper describes an application of information presentation based geographic map for maritime information, including navigation information. The work is motivated by the need to prepare maritime information representation and distribution for future generation Web network technology. This works consist of map generation using GML and application to maritime information. GML 3.0 became an adopted specification of the Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC) in January 2003, and is rapidly emerging as the world standard for the encoding, transport and storage of all forms of geographic information. This paper looks at the application of GML to one of the more challenging areas of maritime information. Specific features of GML of interest to maritime information provider are discussed and then illustrated through a series of maritime information case studies. The first phase of the work consists of the construction of GML application schema for using as a base map of maritime information. Maritime information is acquired from multiple sources, including standards documents, database schemas, lexicons, collections of symbol definition. The sources of GML ontological knowledge and the contribution of each source to the overall ontology are described in this paper. In the second phase, the prepared GML is used to create a prototype of the mixed maritime information as a base map - for tagging documents within the maritime domain. An overview of this prototype is included. One application area for these information elements described here is the integrated retrieval of maritime information from diverse sources, ranging from Web sites to nautical chart databases and text documents.