A Platform for the Development of Semantic Interoperable Geographic Applications

Enterprise level integration of GI poses several challenges both on the syntactic and semantic aspects of the data repositories. With advent of Web service technology, more and more geospatial information (GI) are being made available on the Web as Web services. Defining standard service description techniques and efficient method for service discovery are the important issues required to be addressed. The main contribution of the paper is a platform for geospatial integration from diverse spatial data repositories of geographic applications using service-based methodology. Ontology-based discovery and retrieval of GI services efficiently handles the problem of semantic heterogeneity. The implementation is in compliant with the Web service standards proposed by OGC. We have also proposed a method for service ranking based on ontology.