Enhance discovery and retrieval of geospatial data using SOA and Semantic Web technologies

The ability to find and access geospatial data over the Internet through a single tool will be a great benefit for researchers who try to collect relevant data for a particular study. This requires a unified system to bring together diverse data sources so that they can be searched simultaneously in a single environment. Dealing with diversity of data sources and coping with heterogeneities that exist between them are the major challenges in this endeavor. This paper presents the efforts of combining Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standards and ontologies to address these challenges. The primary goal is to enhance discovery of web services compliant with OGC specifications and promote access to geospatial information via the OGC services. To this end, this paper introduces an approach for incorporating ontology into UDDI registry and proposes an advertisement algorithm for representing service metadata contained in the OGC capabilities document via UDDI data structures, providing therefore a way to record semantic, descriptive and technical information of OGC services inside UDDI registry. Then the paper illustrates how this information could be used to enhance service discovery with the aid of semantic reasoning. Based on the proposed approaches and service-oriented architectures (SOA) strategies, a web-based prototype system has been developed in order to help users query, access and visualize geospatial data of different types in a unified interface. Several running examples are given to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the prototype.

► We propose a solution for enhancing discovery of geospatial services conforming to OGC specifications.
► The solution relies on a combination of UDDI, OGC standards and Semantic Web technology.
► We develop a Web-based prototype system by leveraging SOA principle and RIAs technologies.
► The prototype system enables to discover and access geospatial service and data in a single system.
► The system is demonstrated through running examples for resolving real world problems.