Taiwan to develop web-based Spatial Decision Support System

Taiwan GIS Centre, the country’s premiere GIS “think tank” is developing its web-based spatial decision support system on the Government Cloud, which would enable the central and local government, private industries, and the general public to access spatial information through various medium such as the internet and mobile phones.

Chih-Hong Sun, Director of the Taiwan GIS Centre (TGIC) told Futuregov Asia Pacific that the TGIC is developing an application portal that would use a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to enable better reusing, sharing, and managing of spatial information.
“Traditionally, an SDSS has been confined to the use of a pre-encoded database and knowledge for problem solving; however with the recent developments in Geographic Information (GI) services we now see opportunities where we can expand SDSS applications to utilize the wealth of data and resources available on the web”.
Dr Sun added that methods for discovering relevant GI services over the Internet and sharing and reusing knowledge in developing solutions are critical to the success of a web-based SDSS.
“For this purpose, we propose an ontology-enabled problem solving framework based on semantic interoperability and knowledge sharing to enable a web-based SDSS to bring together GI services from web service providers, knowledge and simulation models from domain experts, solutions developed by SDSS developers, and decision needs from decision makers” he said.
According to Dr Sun the framework would include four components: (1) geospatial ontologies enabling domain experts to contribute knowledge and models for reuse and sharing, (2) an ontology registry allowing web service providers to register GI services into ontologies, (3) a web portal where domain experts can evaluate results and SDSS developers can find solutions for specific geospatial problems, and (4) an ontologies engine to infer relevant registered GI services based on the knowledge in the ontologies in response to a geospatial problem submitted in the web portal.
“By continually contributing GI services and knowledge into ontologies, the framework can be developed as a cyberinfrastructure for a web SDSS to share, reuse, discover, and manage various GI services and knowledge as an ontology-enabled method to respond to different geospatial problems”
“The web-based SDSS is an on-going project started from the previous year, and we look forward to launching the GIS application portal using the web-based SDSS hopefully after two months” Dr. Sun said.