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Functional description of geoprocessing services as conjunctive datalog queries

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Abstract

Discovery of suitable web services is a crucial task in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). In this work, we develop a novel approach to the discovery of geoprocessing services (WPS). Discovery requests and Web Processing Services are annotated as conjunctive queries in a logic programming (LP) language and the discovery process is based on Logic Programming query containment checking between these descriptions. Besides the types of input and output, we explicitly formalise the relation between them and hence are able to capture the functionality of a WPS more precisely. The use of Logic Programming query containment allows for effective reasoning during discovery. Furthermore, the relative simplicity of the semantic descriptions is advantageous for their creation by non-logics experts. The developed approach is applicable in the Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF), a state-of-the-art semantic web service framework.

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Notes

  1. Another property of some WPS services is how they deal with the non-spatrial attributes of their inputs; herein, we ignore this issue and focus only on the spatial aspects. Note that the two issues are entirely orthogonal.

  2. We assume that a WPS has a single output, e.g. a single polygon or polygon-layer

  3. This notwithstanding, marking precondition/postcondition variables as “exported” may be useful to explicitly distinguish input/output variables; such special markers are not supported by current Semantic Web Services approaches, and exploring this option is a topic for future work.

  4. Assuming the (taxononomic) relationships from the domain ontologies that a difference calculation is an overlay calculation and Gauß-Krüger is a specific projected spatial reference system.

  5. We assume that the dif(..) predicate is symmetric.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the SWING project, which is co-funded by the European Commission under the sixth framework programme within contract FP6-26514. It has been carried out while the authors were affiliated with the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Muenster (Dr. Eva Klien, Daniel Fitzner) and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Innsbruck (Dr. Jörg Hoffmann).

The authors would like to thank Prof. Dr. Werner Kuhn and the members of his group, the Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL) for their support. Further, we want to thank Nathalie Steinmetz who provided the proof of concept for the ideas by implementing them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung, Abteilung Graphische Informationssysteme, Fraunhoferstraße 5, 64283, Darmstadt, Germany

    Daniel Fitzner & Eva Klien

  2. SAP Research, Vincenz-Prießnitz-Straße 1, 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Jörg Hoffmann

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  1. Daniel Fitzner
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  2. Jörg Hoffmann
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  3. Eva Klien
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Correspondence to Daniel Fitzner.

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Fitzner, D., Hoffmann, J. & Klien, E. Functional description of geoprocessing services as conjunctive datalog queries. Geoinformatica 15, 191–221 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-009-0093-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-009-0093-4

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