Semantic Web Technologies Based Geospatial Services Discovery and Data Retrieval

One of the main barriers to making use of the wealth of available geospatial data is that researchers are unable to rapidly find relevant web services and efficiently retrieve desired geospatial data from different online sources. This paper focus on the development of the geospatial web services discovery and data retrieval system by leveraging the power of semantic web technologies. The most significant features of the approaches used in this work are reflected in two aspects. On one hand, this system combinational uses ontology and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)to reconcile semantic heterogeneity and associate semantic information with the web services discovery and data retrieval process. On the other hand, this system provides an interactive web environment which enables user to one-stop search, download and visualize different types of geospatial data in a single interface. Two investigations involving in searching relevant geospatial data on the Lake Tahoe Basin located at USA were made to verify the feasibility and validity of this system.