Towards Semantic Composition of Geospatial Web Services – Using WSMO instead of BPEL

Geospatial Web Services (GWS) provide access to geospatial data and expose basic processing functionality using Web Service technology. The complexity of geo-processing tasks necessitates the discovery of basic Web Services and their combination to user-oriented and application-specific service compositions. Semantic heterogeneity has been identified as a core problem that hinders the full exploitation of GWS. Current discovery and composition approaches do not address these problems. This paper presents an analysis of the use of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a state-of-the-art composition approach, and highlight its major limitations in discovery and in composing GWSs. Semantic Web Services (SWS) discovery and composition using the Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO) is proposed as improvement. The costs of this sophisticated approach are elaborated.