Applying instance visualisation and conceptual schema mapping for geodata harmonisation

This paper gives an introduction to concepts for a better expert knowledge extraction for geodata harmonisation. Geodata harmonisation involves overcoming heterogeneities on the syntactic, schematic and semantic levels, but user interaction is mostly required for the semantic in-teroperability level. Consequently, the goal is to provide tools to geodomain experts which allow them to use their knowledge to describe the conceptual schemas of their domain as well as alignments to other domain's conceptual schemas in a sufficiently expressive way without becoming experts in ontology engineering. We describe an approach for this that includes both visual analysis on the basis of geospatial instances and specific interaction guidance processes. Based on this approach, a prototypical implementation of a tool called the HUMBOLDT Alignment Editor (HALE) is introduced.