A formal ontological structure for semantic interoperability of GIS and environmental modeling

Abstract

Most of the environmental problems have an obvious spatial dimension and Geographic Information System (GIS) are widely used for solving environmental problems. Service oriented architecture in distributed computing environment with loosely coupled geoservices is a new approach for using GIS services in environmental modeling. The messages exchanged must follow a set of standard protocols which support syntactic interoperability, but do not address application semantics.

This article proposes a layer-based ontology with new layers for describing geoservices. The paper gives an ontology of measurements for describing the input and output of field-based geo-services and a core ontology of geo-services containing the domain concepts related to geo-services. An upper ontology adds new general concepts to an existing ontology in order to make an agreement between geo-service developers and environmental modelers. The layer-based structure is the building block for discovering geo-services that support semantic interoperability in GIS and environmental modeling.