Environmental service discovery based on semantically annotated OGC service descriptions

Abstract

Environmental information is a valuable resource for a wide range of applications and decision support systems in different domains. This is reflected in different initiatives around the world, such as the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which focuses on defining strategies and standards for collecting, defining and sharing environmental data. One of the key challenges in order to boost the collaboration in the community is to find interoperable ways to share this information and powerful mechanisms to discover it. Semantic technologies can provide the necessary capabilities to achieve this. In this paper, we present a solution for environmental service discovery based on semantic annotations. As we target the environmental community, we build our solution on existing OGC standards for service discovery. Our approach is integrated inside the ENVISION platform, the aim of which is to provide non-ICT users with the means to create decision support Web portals based on environmental services.