A Web Ontology Service to facilitate interoperability within a Spatial Data Infrastructure: Applicability to discovery

Ontologies are used within the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures to denote a formally represented knowledge that is used to improve data sharing and information retrieval. Given the increasing relevance of semantic interoperability in this context, this work presents the specification and development of a Web Ontology Service (WOS), based on the OGC Web Service Architecture specification, whose purpose is to facilitate the management and use of lexical ontologies. Additionally, this work shows how to integrate this service with Spatial Data Infrastructure discovery components in order to obtain a better classification of resources and an improvement in information retrieval performance.