Application of Semantic Services in ORCHESTRA

This paper is part of a series of ORCHESTRA contributions to ISESS 2007. For better understanding of this article, it is recommended to read the introduction paper (Usländer (2007)) first. The paper outlines the definition, implementation and application of semantic services in the context of a service-oriented architecture as developed by the ORCHESTRA project. While up to date most standardisation work in the area of distributed geospatial processing has concentrated on syntaxes for data exchange and functions in terms of Web services, the ORCHESTRA architecture additionally covers interoperability at the semantic level. In ORCHESTRA, ontologies provide background knowledge which can be used to explicate the meaning of content. The paper illustrates how semantic descriptions of information and services are covered by the ORCHESTRA architecture, describes the design of basic semantic services and outlines semantic scenarios and their implementation in ORCHESTRA pilots. It can be concluded that utilization of semantic technologies in open, multi-domain and cross-boarder IT environments is an ambitious task but can provide significant improvement for stakeholders.