Using SOA and RIAs for water data discovery and retrieval

The main barriers to make full use of the wealth of available online data is that users are unable to rapidly locate relevant web services and retrieve appropriate data sets from different data repositories as well as efficiently reconcile integration between temporal and geospatial data. To address these issues, this paper focuses on the development of an online Water Data Discovery and Retrieval system (WDDRs) to enhance the capabilities of services discovery, data retrieval, and data visualization. The most significant features of WDDRs prototype are reflected in two aspects. On one hand, a water ontology incorporated with Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) based enhanced services catalog offers facilities to alleviate semantic heterogeneity and associate semantic information with the web services discovery and data retrieval process. On the other hand, by embracing the capability within the context of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and leveraging the latest protocols of several open web service standards and two popular RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) frameworks including the Microsoft Silverlight and the ESRI ArcGIS API for Silverlight, this system provides an interactive web portal which enables users to one-stop search, access, download and visualize different types of geospatial and observational data in a single environment. With the aim of supporting the study of integrated water environmental assessment, several investigations about water data discovery and retrieval were implemented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the WDDRs.

► We propose a mapping mechanism that allows for interoperation between water ontology and UDDI.
► We combine existing standards to enable on-the fly services discovery and one-stop data retrieval.
► We present a novel way of reconciling integration between geospatial data and temporal data.