Ontology-based service discovery in spatial data infrastructures

Spatial data infrastructures will greatly benefit from the ability to compose services providing geospatial data with services for processing these data. 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 a methodology for service discovery which uses ontologies describing geospatial operations to create descriptions of requirements and service capabilities. Matches between these descriptions are identified based on function subtyping. This paper investigates how this methodology an be integrated into existing architectures for spatial data infrastructures, and presents a prototypical implementation.