A Web Coverage Ontology for Geospatial Web Applications

Today's Web contains not only conventional textual data, but also raster data, e.g., 2-D satellite images, 3-D or 4-D seismic sense data. Coverage is a core abstract feature of raster data, and coverage services are becoming a very important kind of web applications, especially in the geospatial domain. The OGC WCS and WCPS standards have invested a lot of effort to specify the capabilities and processing of web coverage services. However, a formal coverage Ontology for its semantic is still missing, which has severely impeded the development of diverse web coverage applications, their scalability in terms of complexity, and their automatic orchestration and interoperability on the semantic Web. Based on the existing geospatial specifications and industry standards, we proposed a web coverage Ontology (WCO) for modeling the core features of coverages, and it extended current semantic technologies with several new complex data types required by raster services. New reasoning capabilities down to the pixel level of raster data also have been investigated and implemented.