Study on Geographic Information Services Taxonomy

Geographic information services taxonomy is part of geographic information services (GIServices) semantics. Being the basic of semantics based GIServices discovery, GIServices taxonomy represents concept semantics and semantic relation between GIServices concepts. Classification methods on information are first depicted in this paper. According to related work on GIServices taxonomy in ISO 19119 and OGC standard geographic Web services types, accessible GIServices on Web are then classified into three types, including geographic information data service, geographic information process service and geographic information render service. Common characteristics of these three types GIServices are analyzed. After that, a hybrid classification method is proposed to build GIServices taxonomy. The classification process of GeoInfoDataService with the proposed method is last given as the example to prove the method effective and feasible.