Facilitating Filtering of Web Feature Services with their Automated Description

An ontology is introduced to facilitate the filtering of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web feature services (WFS) by automatically and semantically describing them. This paper furthers existing work by describing OGC Web Feature Services at the layer level and enabling a more complete representation of the web services’ processes and capabilities by reusing existing ontologies. To evaluate the premises of the ontology, key questions are given and answered using SPARQL queries. Components used in the ontology are explained, and newly created ontology components are detailed out. The result obtained is an ontology linking the OWl-S, GeoSparql, vCard, and HTTP ontologies together to semantically describe WFS, and hence enabling a uniform querying platform for their capabilities and services.