Toward Assessing Semantic Similarity of Geospatial Services

Almost all information has some reference to location and hence termed as geographic information (GI). There is the growing need of geospatial information in all decision support system. Although government or public organization is maintaining large amount of GI as services, the underlying diversity makes them almost impossible for inter-organization sharing. The paper addresses an important issue of GI services discovery model based on semantics of the GI services and subsequent ranking in the order of degree of matching of the semantics of the request and service provided. Ontological thesauri at domain level are used for service-independent matching of request parameters. On the other hand application level ontology for individual services is used for service-dependent matching. The similarity assessment of GI services with the service request is aimed at providing geospatial information close enough to the service requirement