Semantic feature catalogue service

Geospatial catalogue services have been widely used to facilitate the discovery of geospatial data. By importing geospatial feature semantics in catalogue services, it is possible to provide semantics-supported feature discovery. This paper presents an approach to develop a semantic feature catalogue service by combining the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalogue Services for the Web (CSW) with distributed Web Feature Services (WFS) services. Feature semantics are registered in CSW by extending the ebRIM information model. The approach not only facilitates the discovery at the feature type level, but also allows feature instances to be returned through the catalogue interface.