Abstract
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.
Highlights
Geographic information is widely used in many areas of natural and social science research, such as environmental protection, geological survey, land resource security, disaster warning, emergency response and population management, and urban economic research
This study develops a semantic similarity measurement model and presents a workflow of the search engine for improving Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services (OWSs) retrieval using a case study of geology and mineral OWSs
The equation of semantic similarity can be expressed as follows: The values obtained by equation (2) measure show that the neighboring concepts Ca and Cs are more similar than the concepts Cg and Cs located in the same hierarchy
Summary
Geographic information is widely used in many areas of natural and social science research, such as environmental protection, geological survey, land resource security, disaster warning, emergency response and population management, and urban economic research. The NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) map service published more than 240 Web Map Services (WMS) layers, which include many themes, such as agriculture, climate, health, water, and so on, whereas the World Copper Smelters map service only contains two layers It cannot reflect the real similarity between the query terms and the geospatial service when aggregating the semantic similarity of each item of all the map layers directly or expressing semantic similarity by using the average values of all the map layers.
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