An ontology-enabled framework for a geospatial problem-solving environment

Abstract

This paper proposes an ontology-enabled framework for a geospatial problem-solving environment (geospatial PSE) that allows collaboration among Web-service providers, domain experts, and solution seekers to semantically discover and use geographic information services (GI services) to solve a target class of geospatial problems. The framework contains (1) ontologies that provide knowledge bases for domain experts to formalize geospatial semantics and conceptually model workflows of geospatial problems for semantic references and inferences, (2) an ontology-enabled catalog (ONTOCAT) that provides an interface for Web-service providers to annotate GI services using formal semantics for semantic discoveries, (3) a Web portal that supplies an interface for solution seekers to submit geospatial problems and evaluate the discovered GI services, and (4) an ontology engine that parses the problems and performs semantic inferences to discover the required GI services based on annotated semantics and conceptualized processes. To validate the applicability of the framework, a prototype was implemented using an earthquake as an example. This paper concludes by not only highlighting the framework, which may lay a foundation for fully integrating ontologies and GI services to solve geospatial problems, but also identifying future directions for the geospatial PSE.