Information Services and Middleware for the Coastal Sensor Web

It is well recognized that semantic conflicts are responsible for the most serious data heterogeneity problems hindering the efficient interoperability between heterogeneous information sources. In recent years, ontologies are widely used as a means for solving the information heterogeneity problems because of their capability to provide explicit meaning to the information. Several organizations are undertaking the development of domain specific ontlolgies to resolve the semantic ambiguities between various domain specific representations. These ontologies designed for a particular task could be a unique representation of their project needs. Hence, there arises a need to align heterogeneous ontologies to facilitate meaningful knowledge interchange between various sources. Thus, ontology mapping has emerged as an important requirement to enable semantic interoperability between different representations within a domain. In this paper we focus on the semantic heterogeneities present in the coastal information sources whose data are highly heterogeneous in syntax, structure and semantics. Ontological modeling was carried out for the various information sources. A data mining approach was adopted to align the concepts belonging to various land cover ontologies. We present a set of standardized information services and middleware for seamless access to information from various networks.