Ontology-Based Framework for Geospatial Web Services

How to find suitable geospatial information in an open and distributed environment of geospatial Web services (GWS) is a crucial task. However, semantic heterogeneity came to us as a growing hard problem which impedes the deep applications of GWS. For solving this problem, an ontology-based framework for GWS is provided in this paper. This framework can help us finish the following tasks: (1) supplying users with geospatial information through Web services which are compatible to the serial standards of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); (2) to describe GWS through semantic annotation of Web services with ontological concepts; (3) to implement service reasoning by the use of first order logic (FOL) and description logic (DL) reasoners; (4) the semantic catalogues can achieve the discovery and composition of GWS with the help of matchmaking server.