Finding suitable geospatial web services is a crucial task in the open and distributed environment. However, limiting to the current web service technology, keyword-based search in catalogs does nothing to overcome the semantic heterogeneity, leading to find suitable services difficultly or to discover numerously redundant results. Based on study of geospatial web services and the semantic heterogeneity existing, this paper proposes an ontology-based approach for geospatial web services discovery by making use of elements in service capabilities documents. The matching algorithm between request and service description is discussed in detail, and applied to a prototype system for emergency management.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.