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Ontology-Based Descriptions for Semantic Discovery and Composition of Geoprocessing Services

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Abstract

The ability to process geospatial data will be a great benefit for spatial data infrastructures. This requires the ability to compose data providing services with geoprocessing services. Discovering suitable geoprocessing services is a major challenge in this endeavour. Current (keyword-based) approaches to service discovery are inherently restricted by the ambiguities of natural language, which can lead to low precision and/or recall. To alleviate these problems, we propose to use an ontology-based approach to GI service discovery, which rests on two ideas. Ontologies describing geospatial operations are used to create descriptions of requirements and service capabilities; matches between these descriptions are identified based on function subtyping. We use a running example from the geospatial domain to analyse which problems can occur in existing keyword- and ontology-based approaches and how the discovery of geoprocessing services differs from other service discovery tasks. The example is also used for illustrating the prototypical implementation of the proposed approach.

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I would like to thank Werner Kuhn, Sven Schade, Eva Klien, Udo Einspanier, Herbert Kuchen, Jörn Witte and Sebastian Hübner for their input at various stages of the work presented in this paper. The work presented in this paper has been supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the GEOTECHNOLOGIEN programme (grant number 03F0369A). It can be referenced as publication no. GEOTECH-193.

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  1. European Commission - DG Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Via E. Fermi 1, 21020, Ispra (VA), Italy

    Michael Lutz

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Correspondence to Michael Lutz.

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The work presented in this paper was carried out while the author was still working with the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany.

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Lutz, M. Ontology-Based Descriptions for Semantic Discovery and Composition of Geoprocessing Services. Geoinformatica 11, 1–36 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-006-7635-9

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