Semantics-based automatic composition of geospatial Web service chains

Recent developments in Web service technologies and the semantic Web have shown promise for automatic discovery, access, and use of Web services to quickly and efficiently solve particular application problems. One such application area is in the geospatial discipline, where Web services can significantly reduce the data volume and required computing resources at the end-user side. A key challenge in promoting widespread use of Web services in the geospatial applications is to automate the construction of a chain or process flow that involves multiple services and highly diversified and distributed data. This work presents an approach for automating geospatial Web service composition by employing geospatial semantics in the service-oriented architecture (SOA). It shows how ontology-based geospatial semantics are used in a prototype system for enabling the automatic discovery, access, and chaining of geospatial Web services. A case study of the chaining process for deriving a landslide susceptibility index illustrates the applicability of ontology-driven automatic Web service composition for geospatial applications. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.