A Layered-Structure Ontology for Resolving Semantic Ambiguities of Field-Based Geo Services

Most of the environmental problems do have an obvious spatial dimension. In this regard Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be widely used in various environmental disciplines for solving environmental problems. Therefore linking GIS and environmental models is becoming common and interest in merging the technologies. Currently different methods are used for linking which are based on loosely or tightly coupled methods in standalone systems or distributed computing architecture. Developer and the user are confronted with tedious batch conversion tasks, import/export obstacles, and distributed resource access barriers imposed by heterogeneous processing and data environments in the loosely coupled of standalone systems. The tightly coupled of standalone systems as isolated islands are no longer appropriate for heterogeneous environmental disciplines due to the fact that they are still discipline specific. Due to the lack of interoperability, there is no communication in an interdisciplinary effort between GIS and environmental models. The motivations for adopting new methods are derived from the essential needs for supporting an efficient communication by promoting interoperability between GIS and modelers. The standard protocols, in a service oriented architecture, prepare syntactic interface for deploying, discovering and invoking geo services and prevents the service requester from understanding the service semantics. The article discusses about the type of semantic ambiguities related to geo web services and proposes a layered structure of ontologies for solving the semantic heterogeneities.