Catalogue Services Enabling Syntactical and Semantic Interoperability in Environmental Risk Management Architectures

Abstract

This paper is discussing the role of generic catalogue services for environmental risk management architectures based on a two-step architectural approach of the European Integrated Project ORCHESTRA (http://www.euorchestra.org). ORCHESTRA is defining an Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management based on and extending the relevant ISO, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and W3C Standards. Two important topics are examined: 1) the functional requirements for a catalogue in a service-oriented architecture including possibilities for semantic discovery and query, and 2) the role of current well-known standards like UDDI or the OGC Catalogue Specification. Both of these standards have to be supported to gain acceptance in the respective markets. However, they also comprise constraints and lead to additional requirements for generic catalogue services. As a result, the ORCHESTRA solution approach for a generic abstract specification of a catalogue service is presented. The paper concludes with an outlook that the abstract catalogue service specification will be mapped to several catalogue service implementations based on W3C Web Services and including concepts of the Semantic Web that will be demonstrated in multi-national risk management pilots of the ORCHESTRA project.