Semantic Web-based geospatial knowledge transformation

Earth and space science research and applications typically involve collecting and analyzing large volumes of geospatial data much of which is derived from other existing data by applying a scientific workflow. Such a step-by-step process can be viewed as a process of geospatial knowledge transformation, which often involves hypotheses, inferences and integrations to derive user-specific data products from the knowledge of domain experts. Our research is focused on reducing the transformation effort by providing component inference and integration tools. The Semantic Web envisions a new standardized information infrastructure to enable interoperable machine-to-machine interactions and automatic or semi-automatic service chaining for deriving knowledge over networks. This paper describes a generic framework and implementation of how the Semantic Web proceeds through the life cycle of geospatial knowledge transformation, from geospatial modeling (knowledge formalization), through model instantiation (service chain) to model execution (data product). Our approach relies on semantic integrations. A number of ontologies used to capture domain knowledge are introduced in this paper as the basis of knowledge bases for describing and reasoning geospatial data and services. Also, a semantically enabled geospatial catalog service is described to enable more effective discovery, automation and integration of geospatial data and services. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.