Publication and Discovery of Semantically Annotated Geospatial Web Services

Abstract

Environmental information and services have become a crucial asset in the creation of decission support systems. Unfortunately, this information and services are not usually exposed in an interoperable and standard way, limiting their reusability and impact in the community. Publishing and discovering geospatial information and services on the Web is therefore an important challenge in order to create a breeding ground for collaboration and more sophisticated environmental platforms. Based on common standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as the starting point to ensure interoperability, we propose a discovery mechanism based on semantic annotations. OGC service descriptions are annotated with SAWSDL and linked to concepts in domain ontologies, following a common semantic service model. We seamlessly integrate the semantics in the standard OGC discovery infrastructure, extending the CSW service catalogues with semantic publication and discovery. Semantics queries can be created based on formal languages like WSML, significantly improving the precission of discovery. In this paper we present our approach, which provides a semantic infrastructure for publication and discovery of environmentally enabled web services.