Ontology-Driven Architecture for Geographic Information Systems: Application Integration and Service-Oriented Middleware approaches

Two of the factors that lead the continuous growth of the internet are the evolution of the available products, from a collection of pages toward a collection of services that interoperate through the Internet, and the increasing popularity of heterogeneous computer receiving devices, such as palmtops and handheld computers. Thus, interoperability in Internet environments becomes the main technological concern. Standards specification constitutes the foundation of the web service community in which Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) [1] is one of the members. Besides, a standard UDDI registry does not make use of semantic information because it is agnostic in relation to the web services functionality and, by itself, cannot provide automatic quick responses in locating web services on the bases of their functionality. Under the scope of this paper is the study of using of ontology in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). A new conceptual domain level is defined upon GIS shared knowledge and data, increasing the “intelligence” of GIS networks. In this paper is proposed a service oriented architecture involving the server components and client applications. In detail, we present the design and implementation of an enhanced UDDI server that provides the publishing and discovery of rich web service profiles based on context-aware semantic information.