Research on ontology for geospatial Web services1

Discovery and access of Web services for geographic information on the Semantic Web has not been addressed yet by the Semantic Web community or by the geographic information community. However, ISO/TC 211 in the ISO Technical Specification ISO/TS 19150-1:2012, Geographic information — Ontology — Part 1: Framework provides a plan to cover this purpose. Recently, ISO/TC 211 approved a new project ISO 19150-4, Geographic information — Ontology — Part 4: Service ontology, for the development of a new ISO standard that deals with Web services for geographic information. This ISO standard has reached the draft international standard stage. This paper aims at providing an overall description of the standard including the ontological framework for geographic information services and a crosswalk with other frameworks for Web services (such as OWL-S, SWSO, WSMO) to support interoperability with them.