GeoNote: A Web Service for Geographic Data Annotation in Biodiversity Information Systems

Abstract

Biodiversity studies are often based on the use of data  associated with ?eld observations. These data are usually associated with a geographic location. Most of existing biodiversity information systems provides support for storing and querying geographic data. Annotation services, in  general, are not supported. This paper presents an annotation web service to correlate biodiversity data with geographic information. We use superimposed information concepts for constructing a Web service for annotating vector geographic data. The Web service speci?cation includes the de?nition of a generic API for handling annotations and the de?nition of a data model for storing them. The solution was validated through the implementation of a prototype for the biodiversity domain considering a potential usage scenario.