An OGC web service geospatial data semantic similarity model for improving geospatial service discovery

Abstract

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services (OWS) are highly significant for geospatial data sharing and widely used in many scientific fields. However, those services are hard to find and utilize effectively. Focusing on addressing the big challenge of OWS resource discovery, we propose a measurement model that integrates spatiotemporal similarity and thematic similarity based on ontology semantics to generate a more efficient search method: OWS Geospatial Data Semantic Similarity Model (OGDSSM)-based search engine for semantically enabled geospatial data service discovery that takes into account the hierarchy difference of geospatial service documents and the number of map layers. We implemented the proposed OGDSSM-based semantic search algorithm on United States Geological Survey mineral resources geospatial service discovery. The results show that the proposed search method has better performance than the existing search engines that are based on keyword-based matching, such as Lucene, when recall, precision, and F-measure are taken into consideration. Furthermore, the returned results are ranked based on semantic similarity, which makes it easier for users to find the most similar geospatial data services. Our proposed method can thus enhance the performance of geospatial data service discovery for a wide range of geoscience applications.