Linked raster data

Linked Data (LD) is a paradigm that allows linking various heterogeneous data sources in a well-defined way (Bizer, Heath, & Berners-Lee, 2009). These links establish a Web of Data (WoD), instead of a web of html documents. In the WoD more and more geographic data sets are made available such as GeoNames, dbPedia, etc. These are usually created from a GIS system and published as a static data set. Approaches like Geo-SPARQL aim towards processing these sets of Linked Geo Data but only little research has been performed how to use LD in the context of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)–both as an input to GIS operations as well as its output.Even less work has been done for LD-enabled raster data processing. Based on recent work (Fleischli, 2012) we investigate in this paper how geo-spatial data, in particular raster data and, even more important, operations on it, can be linked to the WoD in both directions.