A semantic index structure for integrating OGC services in a spatial search engine

Abstract

There are a huge number of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). This has several advantages, but it is really difficult for a user to know what spatial service could satisfy his/her needs. For this reason, the SDI community now demands an approach to integrate SDIs and relate them with semantic features. In order to contribute to a solution, in this paper we propose an approach to construct an ad-hoc semantic-index structure (ontology) to relate political divisions, non-political place names and layers offered by OGC services. In this way we can integrate spatial OGC services with semantic concepts. Then, a search engine allows users to find OGC services using semantic criteria.

Search Engine for Open Geospatial Consortium Web Services Improving Discoverability through Natural Language Processing-Based Processing and Ranking

“…An index structure is required to resolve search queries efficiently. The purpose of the index is to provide efficient access to all the relevant items and, consequently, considerably reduce the amount of data that need to be processed by the ranking functions [1]. With a vast amount of data, an index can be divided into parts to allow for distributed processing, thus improving response times.…”

“…A domain that has proven particularly challenging is the one involving geospatial data, specifically, in the case of geospatial web services. Despite the clear XML structure, they lack a centralized index, which thus makes it difficult for search engines to crawl and index them comprehensively [1].…”

“…This core function can be leveraged to automatically discover and collect information about the services and elaborate the listed metadata to gain additional insight. Existing works [1,5] integrate a crawler module to collect OWSs published on the internet and validate the retrieved information and services with the GetCapabilities operation. As a result, further operations can be applied to the data, aiming to check the metadata quality, implement ad hoc ontology, and geocode the data [1,5].…”

“…Existing works [1,5] integrate a crawler module to collect OWSs published on the internet and validate the retrieved information and services with the GetCapabilities operation. As a result, further operations can be applied to the data, aiming to check the metadata quality, implement ad hoc ontology, and geocode the data [1,5].…”