Abstract

Under a service oriented architecture, integrating services which provide semantically heterogeneous data is problematic and beyond manual efforts. This paper describes the approach for integration of geographic data from different Web Feature Service (WFS) enabled sources. We use ontologies for resolving semantic heterogeneity between various data sources. Semantic translation of user's query, based on given ontology of the user and ontologies of registered multiple data providers is necessary to retrieve semantically relevant geospatial data. We demonstrate a methodology, based on a framework for interoperability, to request and obtain geospatial data using mappings between ontologies of users and data providers. The methodology includes a real-time translation of user queries into processable service requests across semantically heterogeneous geospatial services. Ranking of multiple sources based on semantically relevant sources and challenges of combining data from such multiple sources are discussed.