An extensible semantic catalogue for geospatial web services

Abstract

Searching for web services is a challenging task due to the diversity of existing discovery tools. Varying standards for service descriptions require different tools to query their content. These standards exist for good reasons. Web services are used in different application environments and special solutions are required for their integration. We suggest an architecture for web service catalogues, which takes this diversity of standards into account. Its extensibility allows for a complete separation between service discovery and service description. Using ontologies for the storage of service descriptions enables the support of different description standards without loosing their specific advantages. The discussion and implementation focuses on geospatial web services. Due to the heterogeneity of spatially referenced data, different specifications exist for them, making the problem of different standards for service discovery and service description most evident here.