G-Map Semantic Mapping Approach to Improve Semantic Interoperability of Distributed Geospatial Web Services

The geospatial domain is influenced by the Web developments; consequently, an increasing number of geospatial web services become available through Internet. A rich description of geospatial web services is required to resolve semantic heterogeneity and achieve semantic interoperability of geospatial web services. However, existing geospatial web services descriptions and semantic mapping approaches employed to reconcile them are not always rich enough, especially with respect to semantics of spatiotemporal features. This article proposes a new semantic mapping model, the G-MAP, which is based on a semantically augmented description of geospatial web services. G-MAP introduces the idea of semantic mappings between services that depends on context, and an augmented mapping technique based on dependencies between features of concepts describing geo-services. An implementation scenario demonstrates the validity of our approach.