A Practical Geographic Ontology for Spatial Web Services

The application of ontology in Web services context for dynamic discovery, autonomous composition, invocation and monitoring has been deemed as very promising in semantic Web based enterprise application integration and m-commerce. There are many initiatives aiming to realize pervasive services to enable effective enactment of better quality of services, such as sensitiveness on service locations. The traditional WSDL is hardly qualified enough to tackle new challenges such as accurate representation of the non-functional properties of services. Hence, OWL-S came up with an effectual approach to facilitating semantic service description, dynamic composition, on-the-fly execution, and many other tasks. In this paper, we propose a practical geographic ontology based on Geography Markup Language (GML) and extend OWL-S profile to formulate new geographic profiles. We also discuss specific scenarios where context-aware services invocation peers, which are advertised and coordinated via a newly designed GeoProfile, can be equipped with geographic information inherently to distinguish different peers.