A Methodology Based on Ontology for Geo-Service Discovery

Due to popular use of internet and fast progress of communications technology, the researches related to GIS in environmental models is being focused to use Geospatial Information System (GIS) in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this architecture, the geo service requesters can access the provided geo-services through the communication network by using client/server method. Effectiveness of the method depends on the existence of interoperability especially at semantic level. Lack of semantic interoperability makes obstacles for automated discovery of geo-services. The current article proposes a methodology based on ontology for discovering field-based geo-services. An ontological structure including the ontology of measurement theory, the core ontology of geo services and the upper ontology supports semantic framework for this methodology. In the other words, these ontologies provide required knowledge for describing ontologies of provided and requested geo-services. Sample ontologies have been built to test the implementation of the proposed methodology for discovering geo-services. In this regard, a geo-service discovery application has been developed by this research in order to implement a prototype of the methodology.