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Automatic geospatial metadata generation for earth science virtual data products

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Abstract

Recent advances in Semantic Web and Web Service technologies has shown promise for automatically deriving geospatial information and knowledge from Earth science data distributed over the Web. In a service-oriented environment, the data, information, and knowledge are often consumed or produced by complex, distributed geoscientific workflows or service chains. In order for the chaining results to be consumable, sufficient metadata for data products to be delivered by service chains must be provided. This paper proposes automatic generation of geospatial metadata for Earth science virtual data products. A virtual data product is represented using process models, and can be materialized on demand by dynamically binding and chaining archived data and services, as opposed to requiring that Earth science data products be physically archived. Semantics-enabled geospatial metadata is generated, validated, and propagated during the materialization of a virtual data product. The generated metadata not only provides a context in which end-users can interpret data products before intensive execution of service chains, but also assures semantic consistency of the service chains.

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Notes

  1. Land cover classes defined by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP)

  2. An example OWL-S file for the wildfire prediction service is available at http://www.laits.gmu.edu/geo/ontology/owls/ap/v1/wps_wildfireprediction.owl.

  3. This case was demonstrated in the Semantic Web Challenge of the 5th International Semantic Web conference in Athens, GA, USA. The final service chain represented using OWL-S is available at http://www.laits.gmu.edu/geo/nga/demo2/cp.owl.

  4. This case was successfully demonstrated in July 2007 at Summer ESIP Federation meeting in University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. The final service chain represented using OWL-S is available at http://www.laits.gmu.edu/geo/ontology/owls/cp/wildfirecase.owl.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the four anonymous reviewers, and to Dr. Barry Schlesinger for their detailed comments that helped improve the quality of the paper. This work was funded jointly by National Basic Research Program of China (2011CB707105), Project 40801153 and 41023001 supported by NSFC, LIESMARS and SKLSE (Wuhan University) Special Research Fundings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, China, 430079

    Peng Yue & Jianya Gong

  2. Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS), George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 6E1, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Liping Di

  3. Department of Mathematics, Hubei University of Education, Nanhuan Road 1, Wuhan, Hubei, China, 430205

    Lianlian He

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  1. Peng Yue
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Correspondence to Peng Yue.

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Yue, P., Gong, J., Di, L. et al. Automatic geospatial metadata generation for earth science virtual data products. Geoinformatica 16, 1–29 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-011-0123-x

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