A semantic index structure for integrating OGC services in a spatial search engine

Abstract

There are a huge number of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). This has several advantages, but it is really difficult for a user to know what spatial service could satisfy his/her needs. For this reason, the SDI community now demands an approach to integrate SDIs and relate them with semantic features. In order to contribute to a solution, in this paper we propose an approach to construct an ad-hoc semantic-index structure (ontology) to relate political divisions, non-political place names and layers offered by OGC services. In this way we can integrate spatial OGC services with semantic concepts. Then, a search engine allows users to find OGC services using semantic criteria.