An ontological engineering approach for integrating CAD and GIS to support infrastructure management

Infrastructure managers rely on capabilities of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) for making decisions during the implementation of engineering tasks. However, despite the fact that there are domains in which both CAD and GIS are used and despite the overlaps between the data and operations they support, CAD and GIS have been developed independently over many years resulting in platforms that are not easily integrated. Engineers in infrastructure management must gain knowledge and skills in both CAD and GIS to perform infrastructure management tasks. In most cases, they need to manually transfer data queried from one system to another, due to the heterogeneous nature, such as data and operations heterogeneity, of CAD and GIS. Interoperability is seen as a solution to overcome the problems associated with heterogeneous environments and may occur at different levels and for different purposes. In this paper, we discuss the need for semantic interoperability between GIS and CAD and present an ontological engineering methodology as a possible means to enable this interoperability. This methodology uses ontological-based techniques for resolving the semantic differences in queries requiring CAD and GIS data and operations.