Towards logic-based geospatial feature discovery and integration using web feature service and geospatial semantic web

Open geospatial consortium (OGC) web feature services (WFSs) facilitate feature-level spatial data sharing over the web. However, OGC WFSs only emphasize technical data interoperability via standard interfaces and cannot resolve semantic heterogeneity problems in spatial data sharing. The lack of explicit semantics in the OGC WFS description proves to be a major limitation to automatic geospatial feature discovery and WFS composition. To overcome these limitations, this study proposed a solution for searching, discovering, and composing semantically heterogeneous transportation spatial data at feature level from different sources over the web through providing semantic specifications of WFSs. Geospatial semantic web technologies such as description logic, description logic-based reasoner, inference rules, and web ontology language ontologies were used to support geospatial feature data interoperability at the semantic level. Algorithms for automatic geospatial feature discovery and WFS composition were developed in this article.