Semantics-Enabled Geospatial Data and Services Discovery

Abstract

In the geospatial domain, a geospatial catalogue service provides a network-based meta-information repository and interface for advertising and discovering shared geospatial data and services. OGC technology is the widely used choice for the standards-based interoperability and sharing technology in the geospatial domain. The most widely used interface specification for geospatial catalogue services is the OGC CSW. It is an open industry consensus on a standard interface to online catalogs for geospatial data, services, and related resource information. Descriptive information (i.e., metadata) for geospatial information resources is structured and organized in catalogue services. The metadata can be queried and returned for evaluation, processing, and further binding or invocation of the cited resource. However, current standards mainly focus on syntactic interoperability and do not address semantic interoperability (ISO/TC211 2005). This work uses OGC standards to address the semantic interoperability of geospatial catalogue services.