Research Of Spatial Metadata Interoperability Based On OAI Protocol

The basic geospatial information plays an increasingly important role in some fields such as the energy, transportation, environment, land planning and so on. However, the constraints of spatial information application fields, software for preparation and management of spatial information data, industry standards and application purposes of different departments have resulted in different methods of data organization, data redundant construction and other problems in the process of data collection, processing, handling and application of spatial information. How to carry out the spatial metadata interoperability are not only the key problems for sharing geospatial information, enhancing the efficiency of using spatial data and eliminating Information Island but also a hard problem for the research on the geospatial information science. Although the successful experiences of OAI protocol in the field of geographical information are still rare,it provides the conditions for the implementation of a unified and efficient interoperability framework based on meta-data levels and the solutions for the effective management and sharing about the massive geospatial information.According to the intensively researching on the status of spatial metadata interoperability technology and the technical framework of the OAI protocol, this paper discusses and analyses the existing spatial metadata interoperability methods and the feasibility of implementing the interoperability based on the OAI protocol. In view of the features such as flexibility, openness and scalability of the OAI protocol and so on, this paper applies the technical framework of the OAI protocol to interoperability of the spatial information metadata, designs and implements a spatial metadata framework model based on the OAI protocol for interoperability. This model mainly includes two basic roles: spatial data provider and spatial service provider. The core function of the model is the interoperability between the two roles. Spatial data provider can release spatial metadata by searching interface and spatial service provider can harvest and store the released spatial by harvester providing customers for searching service based on the harvested spatial metadata. Experiments show that the model can apply OAI protocol to the interoperability of spatial metadata successfully and achieve the mechanism of interoperability and sharing for spatial metadata,providing a new solution for spatial information metadata dissemination, sharing, distribution and interoperability.