Through any location based services application (LBA) (i.e. m-tourism), users who request information while on the move, intentionally seek as well a quick and precise answer on any map. However, the quality of the cartographic search engines such as Google maps, Bing, Yahoo Maps, Mappy or Via Michelin relies on their geographic datasets. Typically, these datasets had been collected from many geographic databases worldwide. However, the increasing number of different GDBs covering the same area and the retrieval of accurate data/metadata for the requested service will imply lots of reasoning processes and databases’ accesses in order to avoid nearly-duplicated records when displayed on the screen. The scope of my research is to ensure location and cartographic integrations for m-tourism LBA by retrieving spatial/non-spatial information (place names, geographic positions,category type, semantic details and cartographic symbols) from many service providers.However, this will cause many nearly-duplicated records for the same datasets which would bring trouble to data management and make users confused by the different results of a unique query especially for the same point of interest. In other words, my ultimate goal is to generate automatically a unique map from multiple providers’ portrayals such as Google Maps, Bing and Yahoo Maps while homologous features should be integrated to avoid duplicate icons on the mobile screen. Our conceptual framework, based on some fusion algorithms, ontology reasoning for cartographic interoperability and geo-web services orchestration, had been implemented in some modular prototypes and tested for evaluation purpose.
