An ontological structure for semantic interoperability of GIS and environmental modeling

Service oriented architecture in a distributed computing environment, with loosely coupled geo-services is a new approach for using GIS services in environmental modeling. The messages exchanged must follow a set of standard protocols which support syntactic interoperability, but do not address application semantics. This article proposes a layer-based ontology with additional layers for describing geoservices, especially the measurement units used. The paper gives an ontology of measurements for describing the input and output of field-based geo-services and a core ontology of geo-services containing the domain concepts. An upper ontology adds new general concepts to an existing ontology in order to achieve an agreement between geoservice developers and environmental modelers. The layer-based structure is the building block for discovering geo-services that support semantic interoperability in GIS and environmental modeling.