Spatial decision making is a process of providing an effective solution for a problem that encompasses semi-structured spatial data. It is a challenging task which involves various factors to consider. For example, in order to build a new industry, an appropriate site must be selected for which several factors have to be taken into consideration. Some of the factors, which can affect the decision in this particular case, are air pollution, noise pollution, and distance from living areas, which makes the decision difficult. The geographic information systems (GIS) and the expert systems (ES) have many advantages in solving problems in their prospective areas. Integrating these two systems will benefit in solving spatial decision making problems. In the past, many researchers have proposed integrating systems which extracts the data from the GIS and saves it in the database for decision making. Most of the frameworks which have been developed were system dependent and are not properly structured. So it is difficult to search the data. This thesis proposes a framework which extracts the GIS data and processes it with the help of ES decision making capabilities to solve the spatial decision making problem. This framework is named GeoFilter. This research classifies various types of mechanisms that can be used to integrate these two systems.

Dans cette thèse, nous fournissons un examen complet des technologies du Web sémantique et de leurs utilités dans le contexte actuel des petites et moyennes entreprises (PME). Les approches traditionnelles d'intégration des entreprises favorisent essentiellement les grandes entités. Les obligations contractuelles fortes sur les PME, mais en même temps leur volonté de garder leurs compétences individuelles, et ce, dans un environnement limitant leur choix, les obligent à prendre des décisions stratégiques et de conclure des accords sur le long terme avec leurs partenaires, limitant ainsi leur flexibilité aux fluctuations du marché. Nous proposons, donc, une approche ontologique basée sur Web sémantique pour l'intégration de l'information ainsi que des ressources matérielles de l'entreprise distribuée. Cette approche, basée sur le Web, agit comme un système d'aide à la décision pour utiliser des ressources de meilleure qualité ainsi que pour l'intégration de l'information distribuée. Les travaux relatifs à l'ontologie web, pour l'intégration d'information ne sont pas nouveaux, mais l'approche proposée par nous est une valeur ajoutée pour l'entreprise distribuée. De plus, nous avons également proposé l'ontologie Web sémantique comme un système de configuration pour gérer les ressources distribuées de l'entreprise virtuelle. Puis, nous avons modélisé l'ontologie OWL-DL en nous basant sur la sémantique de la norme ISA-95, relative à l'intégration d'entreprises industrielles. Ensuite, nous utilisons cet artefact ontologique comme un artefact de configuration permettant de gérer le matériel de l'entreprise virtuelle distribuée ainsi que les ressources matérielles. C'est la proposition principale de cette thèse : utiliser l'ontologie Web sémantique comme un système d'aide à la décision pour la configuration de l'utilisation des ressources / In this thesis, we have provided a complete review of the semantic web technologies and their corresponding utility in the current environment for small to medium sized enterprise (MSE). The traditional approaches to enterprise integration favour large enterprise entities and force contractual limitations on smaller partners, but at the same time the pressure to guard the individual enterprise competence is ever increasing, the distributed enterprise (MSE) in such an environment have limited number of choices, which forces them to make strategic decisions and enter into a long term agreements with their partners and this limits their flexibility to the market changes. We, in this thesis, propose a semantic web based ontology approach for integrating the information as well as physical resource of the distributed enterprise. This web based approach acts as a decision support for better resources utility as well as distributed information integration. The work related to web ontology?s for information integration is not new, but the approach proposed in this thesis for distributed enterprise is an added value. Similarly, we have also proposed semantic web ontology as a configuration system to manage the distributed resources of the virtual enterprise, for this we have modelled OWL-DL ontology on the semantic of the industrial integration standard ISA-95, and subsequently used this ontology artefact as a configuration artefact to manage the distributed virtual enterprise material and equipment resources this is the main proposition of the thesis of utilizing semantic web ontology as resource configuration decision support