DAGIS: A Geospatial Semantic Web Services Discovery and Selection Framework

The traditional Web services architecture uses a keyword based search to match a query to one or more service providers. However, a world-toword matching to discover a service provider is too simplistic for geospatial data and fails to capture matches that advertise their functionality using domaindependent terminology. In this paper, we present DAGIS (Discovering Annotated Geospatial Information Services) – a semantic Web services based framework for geospatial domain that has graphical interface to query and discover services. It handles the semantic heterogeneities involved in the discovery phase and we propose algorithms for selecting the best service through QoS (Quality of Service) based semantic matching. The framework is capable of performing dynamic compositions on the fly through a back chaining algorithm. The framework is evaluated by solving queries posed by users in various geospatial decision making scenarios.