Applying Semantic Technologies to the Design of Open Serivce-oriented Architectures for Geospatial Applications

Up to now, there is no established methodology for the design of a geospatial service-oriented architecture (SOA), e.g., for environmental risk management applications. However, there are key design guidelines and constraints imposed by corresponding standards of ISO and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Standards exist on both the abstract (i.e. platform-neutral) and the concrete (i.e. platformspecific) level, e.g. Web services, but still focus on syntactic interoperability. An example motivates the application of semantics: As part of a forest fire risk assessment process in Spain the need to access to “vulnerable infrastructure in Catalonia” has been identified. The abstract service platform offers the capability of a generic feature (object) access service that supports queries with geospatial filters. Currently, it is up to the SOA designer to establish a conceptual connection between “infrastructure in Catalonia” and “features”. An ontological approach that knows the subsumption chain (“road” is-a “infrastructure element” is-a “feature”) and knows that “Catalonia” is a geographical concept would help in the “early service discovery” and would open up new perspectives for (semi-)automated service engineering.