EXPLORING SCHEMA MATCHING TO COMPARE GEOSPATIAL STANDARDS: APPLICATION TO UNDERGROUND UTILITY NETWORKS

Abstract. This paper proposes a preliminary analysis of whether a schema matching approach can be applied for the comparison and possible the selection of geospatial standards. Schema matching is tested in the context of underground utility network modelling and, as an initial experiment, three geospatial standards are compared with user requirements: CityGML UtilityNetwork ADE, infraGML and IFC. The schema comparison is enabled by XSD files, and carried out from syntactic, structural and semantic points of view, making use of existing software. The findings of this preliminary investigation show that schema matching is applicable for the comparison of user needs and existing geospatial standards, and does show some potential, but the matching results are varied and not easy to interpret. In particular, the similarity scores between user needs and standards are very low and the comparison and the selection is not straightforward. Having a strategy - an iterative process - is required. While for this preliminary examination, the focus of this paper is on assessing the schema matching approach (which parameters to take into consideration, how to proceed, tools available, automation aspect), further work will include examining software options and performance, as well as exploring how to take the relatively complex preliminary results obtained here and use them to assist the selection of a specific standard.