SWING – A Semantic Web Services Framework for the Geospatial Domain

The ability to represent geospatial semantics is of great importance when building geospatial applications for the Web. Semantic Web Service technology provides solutions for intelligent service annotation, discovery, composition and invocation in distributed environments. Deploying this technology into geospatial web applications has the potential to enhance discovery, retrieval and integration of geographic information, as well as its reuse in other contexts than the original one. This position paper gives an overview of a recently started EU funded project (under FP6-26514) called SWING (Semantic Web Services INteroperability for Geospatial Decision Making) – a project which is aimed to investigate the applicability of semantic technologies in the area of geospatial services. The goal is to provide a geospatial semantic web framework that facilitates the employment of geospatial services to solve a specific task in geospatial decision making. In this paper, we emphasis the motivation of the project, its goals, its technical organization, and highlight its potential impact.